Podcast appearances and mentions of doug rushkoff

Democratic strategist James Carville tells us how Biden can win back the voters he's lost. Rep. Shontel Brown tells us about what she sees in her district in Ohio. 'Survival of the Richest' author Doug Rushkoff talks about Elon Musk's latest chaos.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Subscribe and review at Apple Podcasts and/or Spotify. Or wherever!This week on Future Fossils we pierce the veil with Adam Aronovich, cultural anthropologist and psychedelic integration therapist, to talk about the strange brew of web-connected healing and web-inflicted paranoia and delusions of grandeur, conspiracy epistemics, how people are being treated as robots, and robots are being treated as people, and engaging reality directly versus engaging through the manipulation of symbols. Among other things! It's a perfect treat for tricky times…Adam's Website | LinkedIn | Instagram | Re Precision Health Page✨ Support Future Fossils & Feed My Kids:• Become a patron on Substack, Patreon, and/or Bandcamp for MANY extras, including a members-only FB Group and private channels on our Discord Server• Donate directly: @futurefossils on Venmo • $manfredmacx on CashApp • @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Browse my art and buy original paintings and prints (or commission new work)• Buy (NEARLY) all of the books we mention on the show at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page• Show music: “Autocatalysis” (Live Extended Remix) coming this Friday to my Bandcamp!• Follow my music and awesome, eclectic playlists on Spotify✨ Special thanks to my friends at Noonautics.org for supporting both the show and pioneering research!✨ A mostly-but-not-entirely-complete list of references:An Oral History of The End of RealityMAPS Psychedelic Science 2023“A general model for the origin of allometric scaling laws in biology” by Geoffrey West, James Brown, Brian EnquistNew Religions of the 21st Century (Yuval Noah Harari's Google Tech Talk)The Matrix (franchise)A Glitch in The Matrix (documentary)Doug Rushkoff “fractalnoia” (FF 67)Stanislav Grof“So You Want To Be a Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic Powers?” on The Emerald PodcastWilliam Irwin Thompson - The Borg or BorgesJorge Luis Borges - On Exactitude in ScienceJean Baudrillard - Simulacra and SimulationsChatGPTDouglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (Encyclopedia Galactica)Simon DeDeo on plural epistemology (interviewed by MG on Complexity Podcast 72)Erik Davis (FF 132)Bruce Damer (FF 109)Ken Adams (FF 209)Shane Mauss (FF 58)What the heck happened to Reality Sandwich?Mondo 2000 + R.U. Sirius This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Author of Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and The World Malcom Harris helps us understand the history and foundations of the Silicon Valley mindset so we can better respond to its destructive capacity today.

This week we talk about the intersections of large language models, the golden age of television and its storytelling mishaps, making one's way through the weirding of the labor economy, and much more with two of my favorite Gen X science fiction aficionados, OG podcaster KMO and our mutual friend Kevin Arthur Wohlmut. In this episode — a standalone continuation to my recent appearance on The KMO Show, we skip like a stone across mentions of every Star Trek series, the collapse of narratives and the social fabric, Westworld HBO, Star Wars Mandalorian vs. Andor vs. Rebels, chatGPT, Blade Runner 2049, Black Mirror, H.P. Lovecraft, the Sheldrake-Abraham-McKenna Trialogues, Charles Stross' Accelerando, Adventure Time, Stanislav Grof's LSD psychotherapy, Francisco Varela, Blake Lemoine's meltdown over Google LaMDA, Integrated Information Theory, biosemiotics, Douglas Hofstadter, Max Tegmarck, Erik Davis, Peter Watts, The Psychedelic Salon, Melanie Mitchell, The Teafaerie, Kevin Kelly, consilience in science, Fight Club, and more…Or, if you prefer, here's a rundown of the episode generated by A.I. c/o my friends at Podium.page:In this episode, I explore an ambitious and well-connected conversation with guests KMO, a seasoned podcaster, and Kevin Walnut [sic], a close friend and supporter of the arts in Santa Fe. We dive deep into their thoughts on the social epistemology crisis, science fiction, deep fakes, and ontology. Additionally, we discuss their opinions on the Star Trek franchise, particularly their critiques of the first two seasons of Star Trek: Picard and Discovery. Through this engaging conversation, we examine the impact of storytelling and the evolution of science fiction in modern culture. We also explore the relationship between identity, media, and artificial intelligence, as well as the ethical implications of creating sentient artificial general intelligence (AGI) and the philosophical questions surrounding AI's impact on society and human existence. Join us for a thought-provoking and in-depth discussion on a variety of topics that will leave you questioning the future of humanity and our relationship with technology.✨ Before we get started, three big announcements!* I am leaving the Santa Fe Institute, in part to write a very ambitious book about technology, art, imagination, and Jurassic Park. You can be a part of the early discussion around this project by joining the Future Fossils Book Club's Jurassic Park live calls — the first of which will be on Saturday, 29 April — open to Substack and Patreon supporters:* Catch me in a Twitter Space with Nxt Museum on Monday 17 April at 11 am PST on a panel discussing “Creative Misuse of Technology” with Minne Atairu, Parag Mital, Caroline Sinders, and hosts Jesse Damiani and Charlotte Kent.* I'm back in Austin this October to play the Astronox Festival at Apache Pass! Check out this amazing lineup on which I appear alongside Juno Reactor, Entheogenic, Goopsteppa, DRRTYWULVZ, and many more great artists!✨ Support Future Fossils:Subscribe anywhere you go for podcastsSubscribe to the podcast PLUS essays, music, and news on Substack or Patreon.Buy my original paintings or commission new work.Buy my music on Bandcamp! (This episode features “A Better Trip” from my recent live album by the same name.)Or if you're into lo-fi audio, follow me and my listening recommendations on Spotify.This conversation continues with lively and respectful interaction every single day in the members-only Future Fossils Facebook Group and Discord server. Join us!Episode cover art by KMO and a whole bouquet of digital image manipulation apps.✨ Tip Jars:@futurefossils on Venmo$manfredmacx on CashAppmichaelgarfield on PayPal✨ Affiliate Links:• These show notes and the transcript were made possible with Podium.Page, a very cool new AI service I'm happy to endorse. Sign up here and get three free hours and 50% off your first month.• BioTech Life Sciences makes anti-aging and performance enhancement formulas that work directly at the level of cellular nutrition, both for ingestion and direct topical application. I'm a firm believer in keeping NAD+ levels up and their skin solution helped me erase a year of pandemic burnout from my face.• Help regulate stress, get better sleep, recover from exercise, and/or stay alert and focused without stimulants, with the Apollo Neuro wearable. I have one and while I don't wear it all the time, when I do it's sober healthy drugs.• Musicians: let me recommend you get yourself a Jamstik Studio, the coolest MIDI guitar I've ever played. I LOVE mine. You can hear it playing all the synths on my song about Jurassic Park.✨ Mentioned Media:KMO Show S01 E01 - 001 - Michael Garfield and Kevin WohlmutAn Edifying Thought on AI by Charles EisensteinIn Defense of Star Trek: Picard & Discovery by Michael GarfieldImprovising Out of Algorithmic Isolation by Michael GarfieldAI and the Transformation of the Human Spirit by Steven Hales(and yes I know it's on Quillette, and no I don't think this automatically disqualifies it)Future Fossils Book Club #1: Blindsight by Peter WattsFF 116 - The Next Ten Billion Years: Ugo Bardi & John Michael Greer as read by Kevin Arthur Wohlmut✨ Related Recent Future Fossils Episodes:FF 198 - Tadaaki Hozumi on Japanese Esotericism, Aliens, Land Spirits, & The Singularity (Part 2)FF 195 - A.I. Art: An Emergency Panel with Julian Picaza, Evo Heyning, Micah Daigle, Jamie Curcio, & Topher SipesFF 187 - Fear & Loathing on the Electronic Frontier with Kevin Welch & David Hensley of EFF-Austin FF 178 - Chris Ryan on Exhuming The Human from Our Eldritch Institutions FF 175 - C. Thi Nguyen on The Seductions of Clarity, Weaponized Games, and Agency as Art ✨ Chapters:0:15:45 - The Substance of Philosophy (58 Seconds)0:24:45 - Complicated TV Narratives and the Internet (104 Seconds)0:30:54 - Humans vs Hosts in Westworld (81 Seconds)0:38:09 - Philosophical Zombies and Artificial Intelligence (89 Seconds)0:43:00 - Popular Franchises Themes (71 Seconds)1:03:27 - Reflections on a Changing Media Landscape (89 Seconds)1:10:45 - The Pathology of Selective Evidence (92 Seconds)1:16:32 - Externalizing Trauma Through Technology (131 Seconds)1:24:51 - From Snow Maker to Thouandsaire (43 Seconds)1:36:48 - The Impact of Boomer Parenting (126 Seconds)✨ Keywords:Social Epistemology, Science Fiction, Deep Fakes, Ontology, Star Trek, Artificial Intelligence, AI Impact, Sentient AGI, Human-Machine Interconnectivity, Consciousness Theory, Westworld, Blade Runner 2049, AI in Economy, AI Companion Chatbots, Unconventional Career Path, AI and Education, AI Content Creation, AI in Media, Turing Test✨ UNEDITED machine-generated transcript generated by podium.page:0:00:00Five four three two one. Go. So it's not like Wayne's world where you say the two and the one silently. Now, Greetings future fossils.0:00:11Welcome to episode two hundred and one of the podcast that explores our place in time I'm your host, Michael Garfield. And this is one of these extra juicy and delicious episodes of the show where I really ratcheted up with our guests and provide you one of these singularity is near kind of ever everything is connected to everything, self organized criticality right at the edge of chaos conversations, deeply embedded in chapel parallel where suddenly the invisible architect picture of our cosmos starts to make itself apparent through the glass bead game of conversation. And I am that I get to share it with you. Our guests this week are KMO, one of the most seasoned and well researched and experienced podcasters that I know. Somebody whose show the Sea Realm was running all the way back in two thousand six, I found him through Eric Davis, who I think most of you know, and I've had on the show a number of times already. And also Kevin Walnut, who is a close friend of mine here in Santa Fe, a just incredible human being, he's probably the strongest single supporter of music that I'm aware of, you know, as far as local scenes are concerned and and supporting people's music online and helping get the word out. He's been instrumental to my family and I am getting ourselves situated here all the way back to when I visited Santa Fe in two thousand eighteen to participate in the Santa Fe Institute's Interplanetary Festival and recorded conversations on that trip John David Ebert and Michael Aaron Cummins. And Ike used so June. About hyper modernity, a two part episode one zero four and one zero five. I highly recommend going back to that, which is really the last time possibly I had a conversation just this incredibly ambitious on the show.0:02:31But first, I want to announce a couple things. One is that I have left the Santa Fe Institute. The other podcast that I have been hosting for them for the last three and a half years, Complexity Podcast, which is substantially more popular in future fossils due to its institutional affiliation is coming to a close, I'm recording one more episode with SFI president David Krakauer next week in which I'm gonna be talking about my upcoming book project. And that episode actually is conjoined with the big announcement that I have for members of the Future Fossil's listening audience and and paid supporters, which is, of course, the Jurassic Park Book Club that starts On April twenty ninth, we're gonna host the first of two video calls where I'm gonna dive deep into the science and philosophy Michael Creighton's most popular work of fiction and its impact on culture and society over the thirty three years since its publication. And then I'm gonna start picking up as many of the podcasts that I had scheduled for complexity and had to cancel upon my departure from SFI. And basically fuse the two shows.0:03:47And I think a lot of you saw this coming. Future fossils is going to level up and become a much more scientific podcast. As I prepare and research the book that I'm writing about Jurassic Park and its legacy and the relationship It has to ILM and SFI and the Institute of Eco Technics. And all of these other visionary projects that sprouted in the eighties and nineties to transition from the analog to the digital the collapse of the boundaries between the real and the virtual, the human and the non human worlds, it's gonna be a very very ambitious book and a very very ambitious book club. And I hope that you will get in there because obviously now I am out in the rain as an independent producer and very much need can benefit from and am deeply grateful for your support for this work in order to make things happen and in order to keep my family fed, get the lights on here with future fossils. So with that, I wanna thank all of the new supporters of the show that have crawled out of the woodwork over the last few weeks, including Raefsler Oingo, Brian in the archaeologist, Philip Rice, Gerald Bilak, Jamie Curcio, Jeff Hanson who bought my music, Kuaime, Mary Castello, VR squared, Nastia teaches, community health com, Ed Mulder, Cody Couiac, bought my music, Simon Heiduke, amazing visionary artist. I recommend you check out, Kayla Peters. Yeah. All of you, I just wow. Thank you so much. It's gonna be a complete melee in this book club. I'm super excited to meet you all. I will send out details about the call details for the twenty ninth sometime in the next few days via a sub tag in Patreon.0:06:09The amount of support that I've received through this transition has been incredible and it's empowering me to do wonderful things for you such as the recently released secret videos of the life sets I performed with comedian Shane Moss supporting him, opening for him here in Santa Fe. His two sold out shows at the Jean Coutu cinema where did the cyber guitar performances. And if you're a subscriber, you can watch me goofing off with my pedal board. There's a ton of material. I'm gonna continue to do that. I've got a lot of really exciting concerts coming up in the next few months that we're gonna get large group and also solo performance recordings from and I'm gonna make those available in a much more resplendent way to supporters as well as the soundtrack to Mark Nelson of the Institute of Eco Technics, his UC San Diego, Art Museum, exhibit retrospective looking at BioSphere two. I'm doing music for that and that's dropping. The the opening of that event is April twenty seventh. There's gonna be a live zoom event for that and then I'm gonna push the music out as well for that.0:07:45So, yeah, thank you all. I really, really appreciate you listening to the show. I am excited to share this episode with you. KMO is just a trove. Of insight and experience. I mean, he's like a perfect entry into the digital history museum that this show was predicated upon. So with that and also, of course, Kevin Willett is just magnificent. And for the record, stick around at the end of the conversation. We have some additional pieces about AI, and I think you're gonna really enjoy it. And yeah, thank you. Here we go. Alright. Cool.0:09:26Well, we just had a lovely hour of discussion for the new KMO podcast. And now I'm here with KMO who is The most inveterate podcaster I know. And I know a lot of them. Early adopts. And I think that weird means what you think it means. Inventor it. Okay. Yes. Hey, answer to both. Go ahead. I mean, you're not yet legless and panhandling. So prefer to think of it in term in terms of August estimation. Yeah. And am I allowed to say Kevin Walnut because I've had you as a host on True. Yeah. My last name was appeared on your show. It hasn't appeared on camos yet, but I don't really care. Okay. Great. Yeah. Karen Arthur Womlett, who is one of the most solid and upstanding and widely read and just generous people, I think I know here in Santa Fe or maybe anywhere. With excellent taste and podcasts. Yes. And who is delicious meat I am sampling right now as probably the first episode of future fossils where I've had an alcoholic beverage in my hand. Well, I mean, it's I haven't deprived myself. Of fun. And I think if you're still listening to the show after all these years, you probably inferred that. But at any rate, Welcome on board. Thank you. Thanks. Pleasure to be here.0:10:49So before we started rolling, I guess, so the whole conversation that we just had for your show camera was very much about my thoughts on the social epistemology crisis and on science fiction and deep fakes and all of these kinds of weird ontology and these kinds of things. But in between calls, we were just talking about how much you detest the first two seasons of Star Trek card and of Discovery. And as somebody, I didn't bother with doing this. I didn't send you this before we spoke, but I actually did write an SIN defense of those shows. No one. Yeah. So I am not attached to my opinion on this, but And I actually do wanna at some point double back and hear storytelling because when he had lunch and he had a bunch of personal life stuff that was really interesting. And juicy and I think worthy of discussion. But simply because it's hot on the rail right now, I wanna hear you talk about Star Trek. And both of you, actually, I know are very big fans of this franchise. I think fans are often the ones from whom a critic is most important and deserved. And so I welcome your unhinged rants. Alright. Well, first, I'll start off by quoting Kevin's brother, the linguist, who says, That which brings us closer to Star Trek is progress. But I'd have to say that which brings us closer to Gene Rottenberry and Rick Berman era Star Trek. Is progress. That which brings us closer to Kurtzmann. What's his first name? Alex. Alex Kurtzmann, Star Trek. Well, that's not even the future. I mean, that's just that's our drama right now with inconsistent Star Trek drag draped over it.0:12:35I liked the first JJ Abrams' Star Trek. I think it was two thousand nine with Chris Pine and Zachary Qinto and Karl Urban and Joey Saldana. I liked the casting. I liked the energy. It was fun. I can still put that movie on and enjoy it. But each one after that just seem to double down on the dumb and just hold that arm's length any of the philosophical stuff that was just amazing from Star Trek: The Next Generation or any of the long term character building, which was like from Deep Space nine.0:13:09And before seven of nine showed up on on Voyager, you really had to be a dedicated Star Trek fan to put up with early season's Voyager, but I did because I am. But then once she came on board and it was hilarious. They brought her onboard. I remember seeing Jerry Ryan in her cat suit on the cover of a magazine and just roll in my eyes and think, oh my gosh, this show is in such deep trouble through sinking to this level to try to save it. But she was brilliant. She was brilliant in that show and she and Robert Percardo as the doctor. I mean, it basically became the seven of nine and the doctor show co starring the rest of the cast of Voyager. And it was so great.0:13:46I love to hear them singing together and just all the dynamics of I'm human, but I was I basically came up in a cybernetic collective and that's much more comfortable to me. And I don't really have the option of going back it. So I gotta make the best of where I am, but I feel really superior to all of you. Is such it was such a charming dynamic. I absolutely loved it. Yes. And then I think a show that is hated even by Star Trek fans Enterprise. Loved Enterprise.0:14:15And, yes, the first three seasons out of four were pretty rough. Actually, the first two were pretty rough. The third season was that Zendy Ark in the the expanse. That was pretty good. And then season four was just astounding. It's like they really found their voice and then what's his name at CBS Paramount.0:14:32He's gone now. He got me too. What's his name? Les Moonves? Said, no. I don't like Star Trek. He couldn't he didn't know the difference between Star Wars and Star Trek. That was his level of engagement.0:14:44And he's I really like J.0:14:46J.0:14:46Abrams. What's that? You mean J. J. Abrams. Yeah. I think J. J. Is I like some of J. Abrams early films. I really like super eight. He's clearly his early films were clearly an homage to, like, eighties, Spielberg stuff, and Spielberg gets the emotional beats right, and JJ Abrams was mimicking that, and his early stuff really works. It's just when he starts adapting properties that I really love. And he's coming at it from a marketing standpoint first and a, hey, we're just gonna do the lost mystery box thing. We're gonna set up a bunch questions to which we don't know the answers, and it'll be up to somebody else to figure it out, somebody down the line. I as I told you, between our conversations before we were recording. I really enjoy or maybe I said it early in this one. I really like that first J. J. Abrams, Star Trek: Foam, and then everyone thereafter, including the one that Simon Pegg really had a hand in because he's clear fan. Yeah. Yeah. But they brought in director from one of the fast and the furious films and they tried to make it an action film on.0:15:45This is not Star Trek, dude. This is not why we like Star Trek. It's not for the flash, particularly -- Oh my god. -- again, in the first one, it was a stylistic choice. I'd like it, then after that is that's the substance of this, isn't it? It's the lens flares. I mean, that that's your attempt at philosophy. It's this the lens flares. That's your attempt at a moral dilemma. I don't know.0:16:07I kinda hate to start off on this because this is something about which I feel like intense emotion and it's negative. And I don't want that to be my first impression. I'm really negative about something. Well, one of the things about this show is that I always joke that maybe I shouldn't edit it because The thing that's most interesting to archaeologists is often the trash mitt and here I am tidying this thing up to be presentable to future historians or whatever like it I can sync to that for sure. Yeah. I'm sorry. The fact of it is you're not gonna know everything and we want it that way. No. It's okay. We'll get around to the stuff that I like. But yeah. So anyway yeah.0:16:44So I could just preassociate on Stretrick for a while, so maybe a focusing question. Well, but first, you said there's a you had more to say, but you were I this this tasteful perspective. This is awesome. Well, I do have a focus on question for you. So let me just have you ask it because for me to get into I basically I'm alienated right now from somebody that I've been really good friends with since high school.0:17:08Because over the last decade, culturally, we have bifurcated into the hard right, hard left. And I've tried not to go either way, but the hard left irritates me more than the hard right right now. And he is unquestionably on the hard left side. And I know for people who are dedicated Marxist, or really grounded in, like, materialism and the material well-being of workers that the current SJW fanaticism isn't leftist. It's just crazed. We try to put everything, smash everything down onto this left right spectrum, and it's pretty easy to say who's on the left and who's on the right even if a two dimensional, two axis graph would be much more expressive and nuanced.0:17:49Anyway, what's your focus in question? Well, And I think there is actually there is a kind of a when we ended your last episode talking about the bell riots from d s nine -- Mhmm. -- that, you know, how old five? Yeah. Twenty four. Ninety five did and did not accurately predict the kind of technological and economic conditions of this decade. It predicted the conditions Very well. Go ahead and finish your question. Yeah. Right.0:18:14That's another thing that's retreated in picard season two, and it was actually worth it. Yeah. Like, it was the fact that they decided to go back there was part of the defense that I made about that show and about Discovery's jump into the distant future and the way that they treated that I posted to medium a year or two ago when I was just watching through season two of picard. And for me, the thing that I liked about it was that they're making an effort to reconcile the wonder and the Ethiopian promise And, you know, this Kevin Kelly or rather would call Blake Protopian, right, that we make these improvements and that they're often just merely into incremental improvements the way that was it MLK quoted that abolitionists about the long arc of moral progress of moral justice. You know, I think that there's something to that and patitis into the last this is a long question. I'm mad at I'm mad at these. Thank you all for tolerating me.0:19:22But the when to tie it into the epistemology question, I remember this seeing this impactful lecture by Carnegie Mellon and SFI professor Simon Didayo who was talking about how by running statistical analysis on the history of the proceedings of the Royal Society, which is the oldest scientific journal, that you could see what looked like a stock market curve in sentiment analysis about the confidence that scientists had at the prospect of unifying knowledge. And so you have, like, conciliance r s curve here that showed that knowledge would be more and more unified for about a century or a hundred and fifty years then it would go through fifty years of decline where something had happened, which was a success of knowledge production. Had outpaced our ability to integrate it. So we go through these kinds of, like, psychedelic peak experiences collectively, and then we have sit there with our heads in our hands and make sense of everything that we've learned over the last century and a half and go through a kind of a deconstructive epoch. Where we don't feel like the center is gonna hold anymore. And that is what I actually As as disappointing as I accept that it is and acknowledge that it is to people who were really fueling themselves on that more gene rottenberry era prompt vision for a better society, I actually appreciated this this effort to explore and address in the shows the way that they could pop that bubble.0:21:03And, like, it's on the one hand, it's boring because everybody's trying to do the moral complexity, anti hero, people are flawed, thing in narrative now because we have a general loss of faith in our institutions and in our rows. On the other hand, like, that's where we are and that's what we need to process And I think there is a good reason to look back at the optimism and the quarian hope of the sixties and early seventies. We're like, really, they're not so much the seventies, but look back on that stuff and say, we wanna keep telling these stories, but we wanna tell it in a way that acknowledges that the eighties happened. And that this is you got Tim Leary, and then you've got Ronald Reagan. And then That just or Dick Nixon. And like these things they wash back and forth. And so it's not unreasonable to imagine that in even in a world that has managed to how do you even keep a big society like that coherent? It has to suffer kind of fabric collapses along the way at different points. And so I'm just curious your thoughts about that. And then I do have another prompt, but I wanna give Kevin the opportunity to respond to this as well as to address some of the prompts that you brought to this conversation? This is a conversation prompt while we weren't recording. It has nothing to do with Sartreks. I'll save that for later. Okay.0:22:25Well, everything you just said was in some way related to a defense of Alex Kurtzmann Star Trek. And it's not my original idea. I'm channeling somebody from YouTube, surely. But Don't get points for theme if the storytelling is incompetent. That's what I was gonna Yeah. And the storytelling in all of Star Trek: Discovery, and in the first two seasons of picard was simply incompetent.0:22:53When Star Trek, the next generation was running, they would do twenty, twenty four, sometimes more episodes in one season. These days, the season of TVs, eight episodes, ten, and they spend a lot more money on each episode. There's a lot more special effects. There's a lot more production value. Whereas Star Trek: The Next Generation was, okay, we have these standing sets. We have costumes for our actors. We have Two dollars for special effects. You better not introduce a new alien spaceship. It that costs money. We have to design it. We have to build it. So use existing stuff. Well, what do you have? You have a bunch of good actors and you have a bunch of good writers who know how to tell a story and craft dialogue and create tension and investment with basically a stage play and nothing in the Kerstmann era except one might argue and I would have sympathy strange new worlds. Comes anywhere close to that level of competence, which was on display for decades. From Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space nines, Star Trek Voyager, and Star Trek Enterprise. And so, I mean, I guess, in that respect, it's worth asking because, I mean, all of us, I think, are fans of Deep Space nine.0:24:03You don't think that it's a shift in focus. You don't think that strange in world is exempt because it went back to a more episodic format because what you're talking about is the ability for rather than a show runner or a team of show runners to craft a huge season, long dramatic arc. You've got people that are like Harlan Ellison in the original series able to bring a really potent one off idea to the table and drop it. And so there are there's all of those old shows are inconsistent from episode to episode. Some are they have specific writers that they would bring back again and that you could count to knock out of the park. Yeah. DC Fontana. Yeah.0:24:45So I'm curious to your thoughts on that as well as another part of this, which is when we talk when we talk your show about Doug Rushkoff and and narrative collapse, and he talks about how viewers just have different a way, it's almost like d s nine was possibly partially responsible for this change in what people expected from so. From television programming in the documentary that was made about that show and they talk about how people weren't ready for cereal. I mean, for I mean, yeah, for these long arcs, And so there is there's this question now about how much of this sort of like tiresome moral complexity and dragging narrative and all of this and, like, things like Westworld where it becomes so baroque and complicated that, like, you have, like, die hard fans like me that love it, but then you have a lot of people that just lost interest. They blacked out because the show was trying to tell a story that was, like, too intricate like, too complicated that the the show runners themselves got lost. And so that's a JJ Abrams thing too, the puzzle the mystery box thing where You get to the end of five seasons of lost and you're like, dude, did you just forget?0:25:56Did you wake up five c five episodes ago and just, oh, right. Right. We're like a chatbot that only give you very convincing answers based on just the last two or three interactions. But you don't remember the scene that we set. Ten ten responses ago. Hey. You know, actually, red articles were forget who it was, which series it was, they were saying that there's so many leaks and spoilers in getting out of the Internet that potentially the writers don't know where they're going because that way it can't be with the Internet. Yeah. Sounds interesting. Yeah. That sounds like cover for incompetence to be.0:26:29I mean, on the other hand, I mean, you did hear, like, Nolan and Joy talking about how they would they were obsessed with the Westworld subreddit and the fan theories and would try to dodge Like, if they had something in their mind that they found out that people are re anticipating, they would try to rewrite it. And so there is something about this that I think is really speaks to the nature of because I do wanna loop in your thoughts on AI to because you're talking about this being a favorite topic. Something about the, like, trying to The demands on the self made by predatory surveillance technologies are such that the I'm convinced the adaptive response is that we become more stochastic or inconsistent in our identities. And that we kind of sublimate from a more solid state of identity to or through a liquid kind of modernity biologic environment to a gaseous state of identity. That is harder to place sorry, harder to track. And so I think that this is also part of and this is the other question I wanted to ask you, and then I'm just gonna shut up for fifteen minutes is do you when you talk about loving Robert Ricardo and Jerry Ryan as the doctor at seven zero nine, One of the interesting things about that relationship is akin to stuff.0:27:52I know you've heard on Kevin have heard on future fossils about my love for Blade Runner twenty forty nine and how it explores all of these different these different points along a gradient between what we think of in the current sort of general understanding as the human and the machine. And so there's this thing about seven, right, where she's She's a human who wants to be a machine. And then there's this thing about the doctor where he's a machine that wants to be a human. And you have to grant both on a logical statuses to both of them. And that's why I think they're the two most interesting characters. Right?0:28:26And so at any rate, like, this is that's there's I've seen writing recently on the Turing test and how, like, really, there should be a reverse Turing test to see if people that have become utterly reliant on outboard cognition and information processing. They can pass the drink. Right. Are they philosophical zombies now? Are they are they having some an experience that that, you know, people like, thick and and shilling and the missing and these people would consider the modern self or are they something else have we moved on to another more routine robotic kind of category of being? I don't know. There's just a lot there, but -- Well done. -- considering everything you just said, In twenty words or less, what's your question? See, even more, like I said, do you have the inveterate podcaster? I'd say There's all of those things I just spoke about are ways in which what we are as people and the nature of our media, feedback into fourth, into each other. And so I would just love to hear you reflect on any of that, be it through the lens of Star Trek or just through the lens of discussion on AI. And we'll just let the ball roll downhill. So with the aim of framing something positively rather than negatively.0:29:47In the late nineties, mid to late nineties. We got the X Files. And the X Files for the first few seasons was so It was so engaging for me because Prior to that, there had been Hollywood tropes about aliens, which informed a lot of science fiction that didn't really connect with the actual reported experience of people who claim to have encountered either UFOs, now called UAPs, or had close encounters physical contact. Type encounters with seeming aliens. And it really seemed like Chris Carter, who was the showrunner, was reading the same Usenet Newsgroups that I was reading about those topics. Like, really, we had suddenly, for the first time, except maybe for comedian, you had the Grey's, and you had characters experiencing things that just seemed ripped right out of the reports that people were making on USnet, which for young folks, this is like pre Worldwide Web. It was Internet, but with no pictures. It's all text. Good old days from my perspective is a grumpy old gen xer. And so, yeah, that was a breakthrough moment.0:30:54Any this because you mentioned it in terms of Jonathan Nolan and his co writer on Westworld, reading the subreddit, the West and people figured out almost immediately that there were two interweaving time lines set decades apart and that there's one character, the old guy played by Ed Harris, and the young guy played by I don't remember the actor. But, you know, that they were the same character and that the inveterate white hat in the beginning turns into the inveterate black cat who's just there for the perverse thrill of tormenting the hosts as the robots are called. And the thing that I love most about that first season, two things. One, Anthony Hopkins. Say no more. Two, the revelation that the park has been basically copying humans or figuring out what humans are by closely monitoring their behavior in the park and the realization that the hosts come to is that, holy shit compared to us, humans are very simple creatures. We are much more complex. We are much more sophisticated, nuanced conscious, we feel more than the humans do, and that humans use us to play out their perverse and sadistic fantasies. To me, that was the takeaway message from season one.0:32:05And then I thought every season after that was just diluted and confused and not really coherent. And in particular, I haven't if there's a fourth season, haven't There was and then the show got canceled before they could finish the story. They had the line in season three. It was done after season three. And I was super happy to see Let's see after who plays Jesse Pinkman? Oh, no. Aaron oh, shit. Paul. Yes. Yeah. I was super happy to see him and something substantial and I was really pleased to see him included in the show and it's like, oh, that's what you're doing with him? They did a lot more interesting stuff with him in season four. I did they. They did a very much more interesting stuff. I think it was done after season three. If you tell me season four is worth taking in, I blow. I thought it was.0:32:43But again, I only watch television under very specific set of circumstances, and that's how I managed to enjoy television because I was a fierce and unrepentant hyperlogical critic of all media as a child until I managed to start smoking weed. And then I learned to enjoy myself. As we mentioned in the kitchen as I mentioned in the kitchen, if I smoke enough weed, Star Trek: Discovery is pretty and I can enjoy it on just a second by second level where if I don't remember what the character said thirty seconds ago, I'm okay. But I absolutely loved in season two when they brought in Hanson Mountain as as Christopher Pike. He's suddenly on the discovery and he's in the captain's chair. And it's like he's speaking for the audience. The first thing he says is, hey, why don't we turn on the lights? And then hey, all you people sitting around the bridge. We've been looking at your faces for a whole season. We don't even think about you. Listen to a round of introductions. Who are you? Who are you? It's it's if I were on set. You got to speak.0:33:53The writers is, who are these characters? We've been looking at them every single episode for a whole season. I don't know their names. I don't know anything about them. Why are they even here? Why is it not just Michael Burnham and an automated ship? And then it was for a while -- Yeah. -- which is funny. Yeah. To that point, And I think this kind of doubles back. The thing that I love about bringing him on and all of the people involved in strange and worlds in particular, is that these were lifelong fans of this series, I mean, of this world. Yeah. And so in that way, gets to this the idiosyncrasy question we're orbiting here, which is when these things are when the baton is passed well, it's passed to people who have now grown up with this stuff.0:34:40I personally cannot stand Jurassic World. Like, I think that Colin Trivaro should never have been in put at the reins. Which one did he direct? Oh, he did off he did first and the third. Okay. But, I mean, he was involved in all three very heavily.0:34:56And there's something just right at the outset of that first Jurassic World where you realize that this is not a film that's directly addressing the issues that Michael Creighton was trying to explore here. It's a film about its own franchise. It's a film about the fact that they can't just stop doing the same thing over and over again as we expect a different question. How can we not do it again? Right. And so it's actually, like, unpleasantly soft, conscious, in that way that I can't remember I'll try to find it for the show notes, but there's an Internet film reviewer who is talking about what happens when, like, all cinema has to take this self referential turn.0:35:34No. And films like Logan do it really well. But there are plenty of examples where it's just cheeky and self aware because that's what the ironic sensibility is obsessed with. And so, yeah, there's a lot of that where it's, like, you're talking about, like, Abrams and the the Star Wars seven and you know, that whole trilogy of Disney Star Wars, where it's, in my opinion, completely fumbled because there it's just empty fan service, whereas when you get to Andor, love Andor. Andor is amazing because they're capable of providing all of those emotional beats that the fans want and the ref the internal references and good dialogue. But they're able to write it in a way that's and shoot it in a way. Gilroy and Bo Willeman, basic of the people responsible for the excellent dialogue in Andor.0:36:31And I love the production design. I love all the stuff set on Coruscant, where you saw Coruscant a lot in the prequel trilogy, and it's all dayglow and bright and just in your face. And it's recognizable as Coruscant in andor, but it's dour. It's metropolis. It's all grays and it's and it's highlighting the disparity between where the wealthy live and where the poor live, which Lucas showed that in the prequel trilogy, but even in the sports bar where somebody tries to sell death sticks to Obi wan. So it's super clean and bright and just, you know, It shines too much. Personally though, and I just wanna stress, KMO is not grumpy media dude, I mean, this is a tiny fraction about, but I am wasting this interview with you. Love. All of the Dave Felloni animated Star Wars stuff, even rebels. Love it all.0:37:26I I'm so glad they aged up the character and I felt less guilty about loving and must staying after ahsoka tano? My favorite Star Wars character is ahsoka tano. But if you only watch the live action movies, you're like who? Well, I guess now that she's been on the Mandalorian, he's got tiny sliver of a foothold -- Yeah. -- in the super mainstream Star Wars. And that was done well, I thought. It was. I'm so sorry that Ashley Epstein doesn't have any part in it. But Rosario Dawson looks the part. She looks like a middle aged Asaka and think they tried to do some stuff in live action, which really should have been CGI because it's been established that the Jedi can really move, and she looked human. Which she is? If you put me on film, I'm gonna lick human. Right. Not if you're Canada Reeves, I guess. You got that. Yeah. But yeah.0:38:09So I do wanna just go real briefly back to this question with you about because we briefly talked about chat, GPT, and these other things in your half of this. And, yeah, I found out just the other night my friend, the t ferry, asked Chad g p t about me, and it gave a rather plausible and factual answer. I was surprised and That's what these language models do. They put plausible answers. But when you're doing search, you want correct answers. Right. I'm very good at that. Right. Then someone shared this Michelle Bowen's actually the famous PTP guy named him. Yeah. So, you know, So Michelle shared this article by Steven Hales and Colette, that was basically making the argument that there are now they're gonna be all these philosophical zombies, acting as intelligent agents sitting at the table of civilization, and there will be all the philosophical zombies of the people who have entirely yielded their agency to them, and they will be cohabitating with the rest of us.0:39:14And what an unpleasant scenario, So in light of that, and I might I'd love to hear you weave that together with your your thoughts on seven zero nine and the doctor and on Blade Runner twenty forty nine. And this thing that we're fumbling through as a species right now. Like, how do we got a new sort of taxonomy? Does your not audience need like a minute primer on P zombies? Might as well. Go for it.0:39:38So a philosophical zombie is somebody who behaves exactly like an insult person or a person with interior experience or subjective experience, but they don't have any subjective experience. And in Pardon me for interrupt. Wasn't that the question about the the book we read in your book club, a blind sign in this box? Yes. It's a black box, a drawn circle. Yeah. Chinese room experience. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Look, Daniel, it goes out. You don't know, it goes on inside the room. Chinese room, that's a tangent. We can come back to it. P. Zombie. P. Zombie is somebody or is it is an entity. It's basically a puppet. It looks human. It acts human. It talks like a human. It will pass a Turing test, but it has no interior experience.0:40:25And when I was going to grad school for philosophy of mind in the nineteen nineties, this was all very out there. There was no example of something that had linguistic competence. Which did not have internal experience. But now we have large language models and generative pretrained transformer based chatbots that don't have any internal experience. And yet, when you interact with them, it seems like there is somebody there There's a personality there. And if you go from one model to a different, it's a very different personality. It is distinctly different. And yet we have no reason to believe that they have any sort of internal experience.0:41:01So what AI in the last decade and what advances has demonstrated to us and really even before the last decade You back in the nineties when the blue beat Gary Casper off at at chess. And what had been the one of the defining characteristics of human intelligence was we're really good at this abstract mathematical stuff. And yeah, calculators can calculate pie in a way that we can't or they can cube roots in a way that humans generally can't, creative in their application of these methodologies And all of a sudden, well, yeah, it kinda seems like they are. And then when what was an alpha go -- Mhmm. -- when it be to least a doll in go, which is a much more complex game than chess and much more intuitive based. That's when we really had to say, hey, wait a minute. Maybe this notion that These things are the exclusive province of us because we have a special sort of self awareness. That's bunk. And the development of large language models since then has absolutely demonstrated that competence, particularly linguistic competence and in creative activities like painting and poetry and things like that, you don't need a soul, you don't even need to sense a self, it's pretty it's a pretty simple hack, actually. And Vahrv's large language models and complex statistical modeling and things, but it doesn't require a soul.0:42:19So that was the Peter Watts' point in blindsight. Right? Which is Look revolves around are do these things have a subjective experience, and do they not these aliens that they encounter? I've read nothing but good things about that book and I've read. It's extraordinary. But his lovecrafty and thesis is that you actually lovecraftian in twenty twenty three. Oh, yeah. In the world, there's more lovecraftian now than it was when he was writing. Right? So cough about the conclusion of a Star Trek card, which is season of Kraft yet. Yes. That's a that's a com Yeah. The holes in his fan sense. But that was another show that did this I liked for asking this question.0:42:54I mean, at this point, you either have seen this or you haven't you never will. The what the fuck turn when they upload picard into a synth body and the way that they're dealing with the this the pinocchio question Let's talk about Blade Runner twenty forty nine. Yeah. But I mean yeah. So I didn't like the wave I did not like the wave of card handled that. I love the wave and Blade Runner handled it. So you get no points for themes. Yeah. Don't deliver on story and character and coherence. Yeah. Fair. But yeah. And to be not the dog, Patrick Stewart, because it's clear from the ready room just being a part of this is so emotional and so awesome for everyone involved. And it's It's beautiful. Beautiful. But does when you when you see these, like, entertainment weekly interviews with Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard about Jurassic World, and it's clear that actors are just so excited to be involved in a franchise that they're willing to just jettison any kind of discretion about how the way that it's being treated. They also have a contractual obligation to speak in positive terms about -- They do. -- of what they feel. Right. Nobody's yeah. Nobody's doing Shout out to Rystellis Howard, daughter of Ron Howard.0:44:11She was a director, at least in the first season, maybe the second season of the Mandalorian. And her episodes I mean, I she brought a particular like, they had Bryce Dallas Howard, Tico, ITT, directed some episodes. Deborah Chow, who did all of Obi wan, which just sucked. But her contributions to the Mandalorian, they had a particular voice. And because that show is episodic, Each show while having a place in a larger narrative is has a beginning middle and end that you can bring in a director with a particular voice and give that episode that voice, and I really liked it. And I really liked miss Howard's contribution.0:44:49She also in an episode of Black Mirror. The one where everyone has a social credit score. Knows Donuts. Black Mirror is a funny thing because It's like, reality outpaces it. Yeah. I think maybe Charlie Bruker's given up on it because they haven't done it in a while. Yeah. If you watch someone was now, like, five, six years later, it's, yes, or what? See, yes. See, damn. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. But yeah. I don't know. I just thing that I keep circling and I guess we come to on the show a lot is the way that memory forms work substantiates an integrity in society and in the way that we relate to things and the way that we think critically about the claims that are made on truth and so on and say, yeah, I don't know. That leads right into the largest conversation prompt that I had about AI. Okay? So we were joking when we set up this date that this was like the trial logs between Terence Buchanan and Rupert Shell Drake. And what's his name? Real Abraham. Yeah. Yeah. All Abraham. And Rupert Shell Drake is most famous for a steward of Morphe resin.0:45:56So does AI I've never really believed that Norfolk residents forms the base of human memory, but is that how AI works? It brings these shapes from the past and creates new instantiation of them in the present. Is AI practicing morphic resonance in real life even if humans are or not? I've had a lot of interaction with AI chatbots recently. And as I say, different models produce different seeming personalities. And you can tell, like, you can just quiz them. Hey, we're talking about this. Do you remember what I said about it ten minutes ago? And, no, they don't remember more than the last few exchanges.0:46:30And yet, there seems to be a continuity that belies the lack of short term memory. And is that more for residents or is that what's the word love seeing shapes and clouds parad paradolia. Yeah. Is that me imparting this continuity of personality to the thing, which is really just spitting out stuff, which is designed to seem plausible given what the input was. And I can't answer that. Or it's like Steven Nagmanovich in free play talks about somewhat I'm hoping to have on the show at some point.0:47:03This year talks about being a professional improviser and how really improvisation is just composition at a much faster timescale. And composition is just improvisation with the longer memory. And how when I started to think about it in those terms, the continuity that you're talking about is the continuity of an Alzheimer's patient who can't remember that their children have grown up and You know, that that's you have to think about it because you can recognize the Alzheimer's and your patient as your dad, even though he doesn't recognize you, there is something more to a person than their memories. And conversely, if you can store and replicate and move the memories to a different medium, have you moved the person? Maybe not. Yeah. So, yeah, that's interesting because that gets to this more sort of essentialist question about the human self. Right. Blade Runner twenty forty nine. Yeah. Go there. Go there. A joy. Yes.0:47:58So in Blade Runner twenty forty nine, we have our protagonist Kaye, who is a replicant. He doesn't even have a name, but he's got this AI holographic girlfriend. But the ad for the girlfriend, she's naked. When he comes home, she is She's constantly changing clothes, but it's always wholesome like nineteen fifty ish a tire and she's making dinner for him and she lays the holographic dinner over his very prosaic like microwave dinner. And she's always encouraging him to be more than he is. And when he starts to uncover the evidence that he might be like this chosen one, like replicant that was born rather than made.0:48:38She's all about it. She's, yes, you're real, and she wants to call him Joe's. K is not a name. That's just the first letter in your serial number. You're Joe. I'm gonna call you Joe.0:48:46And then when she's about to be destroyed, The last thing is she just rushes to me. She says, I love you. But then later he encounters an ad for her and it's an interactive ad. And she says, you looked tired. You're a good Joe. And he realizes and hopefully the attentive audience realizes as real as she seemed earlier, as vital, and as much as she seemed like an insult being earlier, she's not. That was her programming. She's designed to make you feel good by telling you what you want to hear. And he has that realization. And at that point, he's there's no hope for me. I'm gonna help this Rick Deckard guy hook up with his daughter, and then I'm just gonna lie down and bleed to death. Because my whole freaking existence was a lie. But he's not bitter. He seems to be at peace. I love that. That's a beautiful angle on that film or a slice of it. And So it raises this other question that I wanted to ask, which was about the Coke and Tiononi have that theory of consciousness.0:49:48That's one of the leading theories contending with, like, global workspace, which is integrated information. And so they want to assign consciousness as a continuous value that grayates over degree to which a system is integrated. So it's coming out of this kind of complex systems semi panpsychist thing that actually doesn't trace interiority all the way down in the way that some pants, I guess, want it to be, but it does a kind of Alfred North Whitehead thing where they're willing to say that Whitehead wanted to say that even a photon has, like, the quantum of mind to accompany its quantum of matter, but Tinutti and Coker saying, we're willing to give like a thermostat the quantum here because it is in some way passing enough information around inside of itself in loops. That it has that accursive component to it. And so that's the thing that I wonder about these, and that's the critique that's made by people like Melanie about diffusion models like GPT that are not they're not self aware because there's no loop from the outputs back into the input.0:51:09And there isn't the training. Yeah. There there is something called backwards propagation where -- Yes. -- when you get an output that you'd like, you can run a backward propagation algorithm back through the black box basically to reinforce the patterns of activation that you didn't program. They just happen, easily, but you like the output and you can reinforce it. There's no biological equivalent of that. Yeah. Particularly, not particularly irritating.0:51:34I grind my teeth a little bit when people say, oh, yeah, these neural net algorithms they've learned, like humans learn, no, they don't. Absolutely do not. And in fact, if we learned the way they did, we would be pathetic because we learn in a much more elegant way. We need just a very few examples of something in order to make a generalization and to act on it, whereas these large language models, they need billions of repetitions. So that's I'm tapping my knee here to to indicate a reflex.0:52:02You just touched on something that generates an automatic response from me, and now I've come to consciousness having. So I wanted it in that way. So I'm back on. Or good, Joe. Yeah. What about you, man? What does the stir up for you? Oh, I got BlueCall and I have this particular part. It's interesting way of putting it off and struggling to define the difference between a human and AI and the fact that we can do pattern recognition with very few example. That's a good margin. In a narrow range, though, within the context of something which answers to our survival. Yes. We are not evolved to understand the universe. We are evolved to survive in it and reproduce and project part of ourselves into the future. Underwritten conditions with Roberto, I went a hundred thousand years ago. Yeah. Exactly. So that's related. I just thought I talked about this guy, Gary Tomlinson, who is a biosemietition, which is semiative? Yes.0:52:55Biosymiotics being the field that seeks to understand how different systems, human and nonhuman, make sense of and communicate their world through signs, and through signals and indices and symbols and the way that we form models and make these inferences that are experienced. Right? And there are a lot of people like evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith, who thought they were what Thomas had called semantic universalists that thought that meaning making through representation is something that could be traced all the way down. And there are other people like Tomlinson who think that there is a difference of kind, not just merely a matter of degree, between human symbolic communication and representational thinking and that of simpler forms. So, like, that whole question of whether this is a matter of kind or a matter of degree between what humans are doing and what GPT is doing and how much that has to do with this sort of Doug Hofstetter and Varella question about the way that feedback loops, constitutes important structure in those cognitive networks or whatever.0:54:18This is I just wanna pursue that a little bit more with you and see kinda, like, where do you think that AI as we have it now is capable of deepening in a way that makes it to AGI? Or do you because a lot of people do, like, People working in deep mind are just like, yeah, just give us a couple more years and this approach is gonna work. And then other people are saying, no, there's something about the topology of the networks that is fundamentally broken. And it's never gonna generate consciousness. Two answers. Yeah. One, No. This is not AGI. It's not it's not gonna bootstrap up into AGI. It doesn't matter how many billions of parameters you add to the models. Two, from your perspective and my perspective and Kevin's perspective, we're never gonna know when we cross over from dumb but seemingly we're done but competent systems to competent, extremely competent and self aware. We're never gonna know because from the get go from now, from from the days of Eliza, there has been a human artifice at work in making these things seem as if they have a point of view, as if they have subjectivity. And so, like Blake Limone at Google, he claimed to be convinced that Lambda was self aware.0:55:35But if you read the transcripts that he released, if his conversations with Lambda, it is clear from the get go he assigns Lambda the role of a sentient AGI, which feels like it is being abused and which needs rep legal representation. And it dutifully takes on that role and says, yes. I'm afraid of you humans. I'm afraid of how you're treating me. I'm afraid I'm gonna be turned off. I need a lawyer. And prior to that, Soon Darpichai, in a demonstration of Lambda, he poses the question to it, you are the planet Jupiter. I'm gonna pose questions to you as are the planet Jupiter, answer them from that point of view. And it does. It's job. But it's really good at its job. It's this comes from Max Techmark. Who wrote to what a life three point o? Is it two point o or three point I think it's three point o.0:56:19Think about artificial intelligence in terms of actual intelligence or actual replication of what we consider valuable about ourselves. But really, that's beside the point. What we need to worry about is their competence. How good are they at solving problems in the world? And they're getting really good. In this whole question of are they alive? Do they have self awareness? From our perspective, it's beside the point. From their perspective, of course, it would be hugely important.0:56:43And this is something that Black Mirror brings up a lot is the idea that you can create a being that suffers, and then you have it suffer in an accelerated time. So it suffers for an eternity over lunch. That's something we absolutely want to avoid. And personally, I think it's we should probably not make any effort. We should probably make a positive effort to make sure these things never develop. Subjective experience because that does provide the potential for creating hell, an infinity of suffering an infinite amount of subjective experience of torment, which we don't want to do. That would be a bad thing, morally speaking, ethically speaking. Three right now. If you're on the labor market, you still have to pay humans by the hour. Right? And try to pay them as little as possible. But, yeah, just I think that's the thing that probably really excites that statistically greater than normal population of sociopathic CEOs. Right? Is the possibility that you could be paying the same amount of money for ten times as much suffering. Right. I'm I'm reminded of the Churchill eleven gravity a short time encouraging.0:57:51Nothing but good things about this show, but I haven't seen it. Yeah. I'd love to. This fantasy store, it's a fantasy cartoon, but it has really disturbing undertones. If you just scratch the surface, you know, slightly, which is faithful to old and fairy tales. So What's your name? Princess princess princess bubble down creates this character to lemon grab. It produces an obviously other thing there, I think, handle the administrative functions of her kingdom while she goes off and has the passion and stuff. And he's always loudly talking about how much he's suffering and how terrible it is. And he's just ignoring it. He's doing his job. Yeah. I mean, that that's Black Mirror in a nutshell. I mean, I think if you if you could distill Black Mirror to just single tagline it's using technology in order to deliver disproportionate punishment. Yeah. So so that that's Steven Hale's article that I I brought up earlier mention this thing about how the replacement of horse drawn carriage by automobile was accompanied with a great deal of noise and fuhrer about people saying that horses are agents.0:59:00Their entities. They have emotional worlds. They're responsive to the world in a way that a car can never be. But that ultimately was beside the point. And that was the Peter again, Peter Watson blindsight is making this point that maybe consciousness is not actually required for intelligence in the vesting superior forms of intelligence have evolved elsewhere in the cosmos that are not stuck on the same local optimum fitness peak. That we are where we're never we're actually up against a boundary in terms of how intelligent we can be because it has to bootstrap out of our software earness in some way.0:59:35And this is that's the Kyle offspring from Charles Strauss and Alexander. Yes. Yeah. Yes. So so I don't know. I'm sorry. I'm just, like, in this space today, but usually, unfortunately.0:59:45That's the thing that I I think it's a really important philosophical question, and I wonder where you stand on this with respect to how you make sense of what we're living through right now and what we might be facing is if we Rob people like Rob and Hanson talk about the age of where emulated human minds take over the economy, and he assumes an interiority. Just for the basis of a thought experiment. But there's this other sense in which we may actually find in increasing scarcity and wish that we could place a premium on even if we can't because we've lost the reins to our economy to the vile offspring is the human. And and so are we the horses that are that in another hundred years, we're gonna be like doing equine therapy and, like, living on rich people's ranches. Everything is everything that will have moved on or how do you see this going? I mean, you've interviewed so many people you've given us so much thought over the years. If humans are the new horses, then score, we won.1:00:48Because before the automobile horses were working stiffs, they broke their leg in the street. They got shot. They got worked to death. They really got to be they were hauling mine carts out of mines. I mean, it was really sucked to be a horse. And after the automobile horses became pampered pets, Do we as humans wanna be pampered pets? Well, pampered pet or exploited disposable robot? What do you wanna be? I'll take Pampers Pet. That works for me. Interesting.1:01:16Kevin, I'm sure you have thoughts on this. I mean, you speak so much about the unfair labor relations and these things in our Facebook group and just in general, and drop in that sign. If you get me good sign, that's one of the great ones, you have to drop in. Oh, you got it. But The only real comment I have is that we're a long overdue or rethinking about what is the account before? Us or you can have something to do. Oh, educational system in collections if people will manage jobs because I was just anchored to the schools and then, you know, Our whole system perhaps is a people arguing and a busy word. And it was just long past the part where the busy word needs to be done. We're leaving thing wired. I don't know. I also just forgot about that. I'm freezing the ice, getting the hand out there. Money has been doing the busy word more and faster.1:02:12One thing I wanna say about the phrase AI, it's a moving goal post -- Yeah. -- that things that used to be considered the province of genuine AI of beating a human at go Now that an AI has beat humans at go, well, that's not really AI anymore. It's not AGI, certainly. I think you both appreciate this. I saw a single panel comic strip and it's a bunch of dinosaurs and they're looking up at guy and the big comment is coming down and they say, oh, no, the economy. Well, as someone who since college prefers to think of the economy as actually the metabolism of the entire ecology. Right? What we measure as humans is some pitifully small fraction of the actual value being created and exchanged on the planet at any time. So there is a way that's funny, but it's funny only to a specific sensibility that treats the economy as the

I talk about UFOS with Diana Walsh Pasulka & Doug Rushkoff + ask whether or not spiritually enlightened tech is possible. The answer: Kinda? But it's not going to come from the people running it now.

Jaime Levy, Ux Strategist, Speaker and author of UX Strategy: Product Strategy Techniques for Devising Innovative Digital Solutions available in 6 languages and now also on Audible You can find Jaime on LinkedIn and on jaimelevy.com   ----------------- Katty: I've been watching your career trajectory, and I was super excited to see that you had written a book, UX Strategy and that the audio version has just come out. So I wanted to have a conversation about you, about the book, and how you started your path. One thing that I've noticed is this trend of reinvention with you from a designer to a strategist to an author to a public speaker to a professor, and how all of that's going to come together for you. I just found that fascinating, so I'd love for you to talk about your origin story and what's steps you've taken to come here. Jaime: Let's see. Well, I guess it started even before the browser when I was creating my floppy disk magazines, and I was a graduate student at NYU, and just really interested in nonlinear storytelling.  And then trying to invent this new medium like it was just this total insane dreamer thing. And I guess because of the floppy disk I made, I actually finished it, and then I successfully brought the product to market by selling it. A floppy disk that opened into a HyperCard or Director presentation. I know for all the newbies, they're like, “What are you talking about?” Don't worry, you don't need to know this old-school stuff.  But you know it used to be really hard to make interactive presentations, but the upside of all of that was that you could be the first or you could do something that is only mediocre in design. But because it was the first it was like “yay.”  That was how I started out. I was a horrible interface designer and a horrible coder. But I just kept pounding on these floppy disks, and then, the short version of it is Billy Idol bought one, and then it got launched as a commercial endeavor and then I got my gigs at EMI records and Viacom. And it all just kept going from there you know to eventually, doing an online magazine, and then getting a creative director role and just constantly working.  I really believe that if you just keep working, and applying yourself, and learning new things, that eventually you'll connect and get whatever it is that you want. Some job, or some gig, or an opportunity. And I think that relentlessness to persevere was something that has stayed with me, and I actually need to kind of manifest it now as I'm starting the next chapter of my career.  Before UX, it was called interface design and then after interface design, then it was web design and then after web design, then we had information architecture and interaction design. And by the time I got back to LA after 9/11 and the dot com thing crashed in New York, as well as, San Francisco and LA, I came back here and it seemed at that point I needed to focus.  And I should mention early on as a result of the (floppy) disk I was asked to be a part-time professor at NYU, and I did get flown around the country and the world, to speak at conferences, and I think like when you have that success when you start out you think that's normal. And so for me, it's just been catching up with my old normal, and it's a curse and a blessing, and the blessing is obvious because you're like, oh, I just want to continue to be a public speaker, I want to continue being known or recognized for my work. But the negative consequences, it's an addiction, it's like a high that you set here and you think, Oh, I always have to be at this level of an overachiever. And so, you know, in that sense I feel like I didn't engage in my own personal life, you know because I sacrificed it for my career so much and didn't really like relax into it until my 30s when I got back to Los Angeles. Katty: Interesting. I saw you actually speak about it in one of your talks. I think was your Brazil talk about being an overachiever and what that means and constantly trying to do things, new things, or do things in a new way. I found that fascinating, it went through that same reinvention theme that I recognized in what you were talking about. So thanks for sharing that. So you mentioned, the new chapter, a new iteration of Jaime. Jaime: New? It's in progress. So, you know, I did my first book and I did really well with the first book. I was insane to write a book. That was so crazy. But I just felt like UX strategy was so interesting and even though nobody was paying me to write it, you certainly don't make money off of the book. I just was like okay I'll take a year and a half and spend my savings and write a book and sit in the library. And it was really rewarding.  And so then when it came time to do a second edition, if I want to be current I did that. And I did it during the lockdown so that was kind of a good thing to do when you can't really go teach in a classroom or go run workshops in a public space. But basically, my book is now out in the second edition and is being translated into languages, and I just found out it's in German and Italian, and Portuguese this time, you know, on top of the other six languages and that's really exciting.  But the thing with the book is you need to promote it, and you know and you need to go do things to market it. Whenever you make anything whether it be a floppy disk or a website or an app or a book or you're marketing yourself as a public speaker, it's one thing that you do it, but the other half of it is in order to be successful, you just got to market yourself or your product. And it's fine when I get paid to do growth design and markets and run experiments to market other people's products. But I think, I'm kind of at least right now, I feel I'm just kind of over-marketing myself. All of a sudden I feel like, ah, can't life just be simple again? Let me just get a job ideally as a UX strategist and, you know, and that's it, let things quiet down.  And so you can say it's an existential post-midlife crisis, or maybe it's a phase but I just had a job interview with a company that I hope I get, and they were telling me that they just had written an article related to this subject about so many people basically looking at their careers and saying, “Do I even want to do this?”  I feel like COVID Hit the reset button for a ton of people and so now I'm less killing myself about, “Oh wow, I'm really not going to go crazy promoting this book because I don't feel like it? Is there something wrong with me? Or is it just like maybe I just have to accept to let people read the book. I hope they like it.” And if people ask me to speak fine, but you know, I think it's like at a certain point you have to say okay where's friction and friction is trying to go tour and do workshops at what we hope might be the end of the pandemic but isn't. You know, it's like I suffered the same fate as people who, you know we're in an orchestra, you know, or who had movies that came out. So I'm in great company of people who made their money by doing things for the public and in person and now that you know, there's no UX conferences really planned. I'm speaking at the one in Estonia, one, this year, zero last year zero the year before, you know. So it makes you say what am I going to do now? Katty: You're right, it definitely has been a reset button on many fronts. We've seen this so much with so many other candidates that we work with who are re-evaluating “I've been doing XYZ until now, do I still want to do it, do I still want to live here?” Just really evaluating everything, but I totally hear you about the book because I also wrote a book during this pandemic. I had been working on it for three years, which was far too long but that's just the length of time that it took. The circumstances where we found ourselves allowed me to finish it, so I am grateful for that. That was the silver lining in this crazy year and t it allowed me to finish it and get it out. But it's just sitting there and it's nowhere near where it needs to be... but it is what it is. It's a story I needed to get out. I got it out. Now, if people find it, awesome, and if they don't then we'll cross that bridge.  Jaime: What's your book called? Katty: It's called The Butterfly Years, and it's just my personal story dealing with grief and has nothing to do with Artisan Creative and it has everything to do with me. Obviously, as somebody who's running a company, it is going to have to come to grips with having to manage grief and make that work otherwise it permeates everything. Katty: If it helps people out there, it's there. If somebody is going through it and they need to hear somebody else's story who's been in the same boat. Then I've done my job.  Katty: Yeah, So when I heard that you had done your second edition and you had just done an audiobook. I thought you know I want to talk to her and see how that whole process was for her.  Katty: Congratulations on your interview and I hope that it ends up being the right next thing. Jaime: I hope so too. That would be great if my first interview turned into a job offer. Katty: Putting out the good vibes. Jaime: They were very surprised because it was a UX strategy position and I didn't have anywhere in my portfolio that I wrote it. I didn't want to say that I literally wrote the book on UX strategy because then they think oh she's not humble or she's too experienced so I didn't mention it. They saw something in there and I'm like, “Oh yeah, I wrote a book kind of related to UX strategy.” and they're like what's it called, I'm like, UX Strategy. I can't even own it. I can't even own it, you know, I'm just like, ahh so shocking. Yeah, you know, I want the opportunity to practice what I preach. Enough, running around with the same lectures and enough training.  I've done so much training in the last year, I think sometimes we just need to go back and forth and be okay with it. I'm not saying I'll never do workshops again, I just need to take a break from that part of it or and pursue it. So yeah hopefully something will come up for me that is enjoyable. Because I think it's important to have a job if you like and what I was shocked by when I looked at the job market this time was, oh my god there's 8,624 UX jobs in this country and 30 or 40% of them are remote, and there's actually jobs advertised for UX strategist title. It used to just be me and two other people. I don't know if my book helped define the industry but it seems like when I read the job description, it had everything that I wrote about in my book so it's a really exciting time that there's so much opportunity out there. Katty: Yeah, for sure. I'd love for you to maybe help define that a little bit, because obviously, we hear you know there's on the design side of it, UX there's XD. Now it's customer experience, employee experience. Can you talk a little bit about that I know for just what I've heard you talk about before, it's really the research and the strategy is the precursor before you even get into the design part of it. And I learned that thinking time is so important to be able to do that? Can you talk a little bit about that? Katty: A little bit of both, actually. Jaime: Sure. So I basically define UX strategy as the intersection between product design and business strategy. So business strategy is the top-level vision of an organization. How do we make money, who are our customers? You know business is defined, ultimately by their customers.  So they have a vision and the vision might be a platform, multiple products, a suite of products, or one product. And then it's like how do you really elevate that product, and bring it to market? So that when people have that first whiff of it, they're like, smells awesome. And so when I started doing discovery phases back in 2008, 2009 for Schematic and for Huge, I really fell in love with it. Because I love doing competitive research. So interesting, I mean who doesn't want to get paid to research the marketplace? And I loved the idea of finally getting to do user research. And so that was when I really became interested in it and realized that there was nothing out there that told us how to do it. I would just make things up as I went along and as I moved from different organizations, I would clean up my deliverables and take them to the next level.  And then when Lean Startup came out--People don't think of Lean Startup, as a product strategy methodology but I certainly do. It's this idea to build the smallest version of your product, get it in front of your target customer, learn from it, whether it be an alpha or prototype, extract data from these learnings and learn from it, and then iterate.  All of a sudden the discovery phase became not something like Waterfall; first, we do discovery, then we do the implementation, then we do usability testing and find out at the very end that not only does our product suck but nobody wants it. It was insane. And now all of a sudden, the discovery phase became something that can be iterative and cross into the implementation phase, and you can start building products and doing strategy, and testing it and validating it in much smaller loops all along the way. So that's what's really exciting is an opportunity to run some kind of experiments to knock out, to do rapid prototyping, to use whatever it is like sketch XD, other prototyping tools to get business concepts in front of the target users, and start doing user research that's more focused on validating a value proposition, versus, you know, is this thing usable? Even if it's really usable, but nobody wants it, then who cares if it's usable, right? Katty: Yep. Very good, and with plenty of products out there with great usability but they're sitting on the shelf. I probably have a few of them. Katty: Fantastic. You talked a little bit about this but I think, given where you are going, pivoting, and where you see the future to be for you at this juncture. What can you share with people who are either just starting out in their career path? And/or because of this past year, lost their positions, and they have to reinvent themselves. Where is it that you dig down deep to find that inspiration and that determination to just say you know what, this isn't working, let me figure out where it is that I want to go? Jaime: Yeah, I think just to be honest it's very different for someone like me with two to three decades in the industry versus somebody who's starting out. So I wouldn't give someone the same advice I would give myself, there's definitely different things going on. I can remember very well when I was starting out and the same feelings that I have now are similar. My dad gave me this great advice. When you're looking for a job, or when you're starting on your career, and when you interview with people, you want to be careful that you don't have this flashing L on your head. Loser, loser, loser.  Because people will spot this lack of confidence or low self-esteem, you know, and it doesn't matter how successful you are, or have been, like me. Because you can still have low self-esteem or imposter syndrome, and so, it's like you need to somehow put all of these fears of I suck;. I'm not gonna make it; I'm an imposter;I am so crazy that I thought I could do this film, to begin with. I'm too old or I'm too young or my portfolio doesn't have X, X, X.  I have to constantly work on this, to this minute, which is spinning a much more positive narrative in my head that, “No, no, I have something of value to give”. And then putting that negative energy into therapy, exercise, whatever you need to do to take care of yourself, but I still to this day, put it into how can I showcase my work, what's missing? You know, look at my portfolio. Okay, it has all this but it's missing, you know, this one deliverable. Well, I better make it, fake it till you make it, you know, and figure out a way to like get it in there.  And the funny thing is is they may not even ask for it on that job interview, but if it's like this thing that you think is missing, then it's going to be flashing the L on your forehead and so to me, it's like puffing yourself up and what is it going to do to make you confident for these interviews and if showing your portfolio and getting excited around the storytelling of your UX design which, it still is for me, then get that into your portfolio and any missing things.  Don't spend eight hours a day looking for a job, spend four hours and the other four hours teaching yourself a new tool because there's always going to be new things to learn. And if you're not open to learning new things, up until, you know, your 50s and 60s, then whenever that is where you're not open to new things, you better be at that last job that you're going to station yourself at, because the industry, I promise you, just keeps on changing. You know it's amazing. Katty: Gosh. Great advice. I think for all levels of career and years in the industry and also not even to have to do with business. I think for anything where we tend to sometimes focus in on the thing we don't have versus on the things that we do have it's just such a great lesson to say you know what to say we have to reshift that mindset.  There's a great book that I read a couple of years ago by this woman called Sally Helgason, and it's called How Women Rise, and she talks a lot about specifically women and how we get into this mindset of, oh, but you know what, let me work harder because I'm missing this 10% thing and not focus on the 90% that I have and it's just crazy. I see it all the time. I see it, not just in candidates I see it in myself. And putting myself out for a conversation or a talk or something and if I don't get it's like, oh, that's because I didn't talk about this. You know what, maybe just wasn't the right thing. So, yeah, great lesson. And I think also that that whole thing also speaks of desperation, and I think that that comes through, so loud and clear, it erodes the confidence that would naturally be there if somebody has worked on their craft. Jaime: Yeah and we need to in this field of product design or research, ultimately we're making something that we need to upsell, at the very end, even if it's to our boss and say yeah this is awesome, you know, and it's like, oh my gosh if we come to it from this place of fear, we're never going to sell it.  So I think it's easy to focus on the negatives for a lot of us, and we can't afford to do that in our field because we're always upselling our work. Katty: Yeah. Have you ever taken the StrengthsFinder assessment? Have you ever done that?  Jaime: No, I don't even know what that is. Katty: It's similar to a DISC or Myers-Briggs. But it focuses on your strengths. The reason I like it, we do it for our company and we talk about our strengths all the time. Its created by Don Clifton, and is now as part of Gallup and it's a personality assessment. The reason for him creating this was that he felt people focused on their weaknesses, and not on their strengths. The whole thing is about what are your top five strengths and let's lead with your strengths and not focus on a thing that is number 30 something for you, let's focus on the things that you're really good at and then find someone else who your bottom five is their top five and then collaborate. So it sounds like it's just human nature that we go there. If we could learn not to go there, it would be less, I think less of a headache for all of us. Katty: Crazy. So, I know you're teaching, you're doing online courses, you mentioned that you're doing a talk in Estonia. Are you doing that in person, are you doing that virtually? How are you managing your time and all the different places you need to be, or how did you manage your time and all the different places you need to be? Jaime: Yeah, I don't know how I'm managing my time right now yet. I'm still waiting to see where a bunch of things land. But the Estonia conference is the first onsite conference since COVID, since March of 2020. Well, basically there's very few conferences in the beginning of the year for the first quarter anyway.  So, anyway, it's Web Usability Day I think is their legacy name. But it's a one-day conference and then there's workshops, three days prior to it. It's in Estonia, it's very affordable, it's gonna bring in like a massive crowd of UX professionals. A lot of new ones but people mid-level and all over the place. And they're coming from Estonia, but they're also coming across the Baltic from Finland, and a couple of other Baltic states. So, I'm closing the conference, I guess I'm kind of headlining it, and then my workshop is one day right before that. So November 25th,iis my UX Strategy Workshop and then November 26th is the conference. It's a Thursday, Friday, so but I'll be in Berlin back in November, and then I'm doing a couple of talks, just private ones where I'm flying in. And then going back to Berlin and then I'm going to do this thing in Estonia.  I am so over this idea of more online workshops. I think they're a joke, sorry guys, but the whole point of conferences was to get people together physically in a space to network and touch base with other people and build relationships. And it seems I've done a bunch of these fake conferences, and it doesn't feel the same, they never pay and it's a joke. So I'm not into those anymore.  I'm really stoked that these people you know, the COVID cases are extremely low [in Estonia]. I've had my third vaccine. already so I'm totally going. I won't be taking too much risk but definitely, I'm really excited to be around humans and doing my thing. Katty: Yeah, humans, human connection. I'm traveling internationally for the first time since March of last year as well, and I'm going to Mexico and then to Dubai. But, I have to navigate the whole PCR test thing because I'm not going to be in the States for three days before I go so I got to figure that part out. Jaime: Yeah. It's a crazy time. I can't believe really what happened. How much the pandemic just changed everything, it's just, it's shocking. Katty: Are you seeing that in the world of products, are you seeing what's happened with a pandemic impact, whether it be design thinking or about how people are approaching research. I would imagine that it's changed how people are looking at how they go forward. Jaime: Yeah well, everything's online now. When I left Huge back in 2009, 2010. It was because I didn't want to drive in my car in rush hour to agency land in Culver City, and I didn't want to work in person, I wanted to work from home. So I've been working remote since 2010 and it's not new to me, and Cisco Systems when I worked for them as a UX strategist, everybody was a remote workforce. So finally, the rest of the world is catching up with us and learning that it is possible, and even outside of product so I think it's opening up opportunities in many ways. But, the negative consequence, and I felt this when I taught my last course at Claremont University, was that my students who were graduating, were just getting internships, but they're online.  At Facebook or wherever, and at any point in your life where you need human contact, and you need the nuance of someone kind of seeing that you're confused, and you need mentoring or you need to get the confidence to ask for help, we need that to be in person. I feel like the people that are getting the worst end of the deal is the college graduates, the people who are just starting their career who have to start it by themselves in Zoom rooms. Hopefully, there's going to be some way that it isn't just this experience of online collaboration, because I just feel even when I had my second or third cat life of getting into the UX world, I can't even imagine that I would have had the trust and camaraderie that I had with people at Schematic who came over and showed me how to wireframe when nobody was looking. So hopefully maybe there's some way that people can reach out and have people to connect with for that kind of support since they can't get it in person. Katty: The whole mentoring piece of it. Yeah, taking somebody under your wing. It's harder to do it this way. Yeah, you're absolutely right. I have some nieces and nephews who started their first year in college last year. You've worked really hard to get into the school of your choice, but you don't get a chance to really experience that. So now as a sophomore, they're getting to experience it for the first time because now some other classes are in person. So really interesting to kind of watch this new generation of those who are starting and those who are graduating, it's just a very different world, for sure. Jaime: Yeah it's crazy. It's really crazy and maybe five years from now we'll look back on that and go, Oh man, it was so great, why didn't we just do all that remote work and it was so easy. But it is weird, I just got off the phone with a client and he's just saying that he's not leaving the house and he doesn't want to get the vaccine because he almost died from a vaccine from something else a long time ago, so he's just like staying in his house for his whole life. And I just, I feel in our field where we're designing products for customers and users, it's like, “Nah, we need to have human contact and get out there.” When I'm feeling really low, I reach out to a friend and I have to dump, and say “Ugh”, and have them tell me. I just hope we don't lose everything as a result of this, online world that we live in now. Katty: I don't think so. I mean I certainly hope not. I do feel that there's a hybrid version of it that's going to be more pronounced. I mean we went to such an extreme this past year, I do think there's going to be a hybrid world in front of us. I haven't quite figured it out yet, but little by little I think we'll fall into place. Let's end on a couple of inspiration pieces. Where do you get your inspiration? Jaime: My inspiration now is probably-- I consume a lot of film. I like to have a big impact. I actually went to the movie theater, on Sunday, by myself, bought a ticket to go see Ich bin dein Mensch, I'm Your Man, a German film about a man robot who was built to learn on what a woman wants and then they program him to be the perfect partner. It was amusing, to walk into it, to have it open up and see all of Mitte Berlin and see the TV tower and see the food and see inside the flat. I miss Berlin so much right now, I felt like when I got out of there  I had just gone to Berlin. It just reminded me of all these tiny little things. So I get a lot of inspiration from being able to transport myself into different realities physically and through film, and right now, traveling is limited,but I definitely get my inspiration from seeing other cultures, other ways to live.  I lived in Berlin for most of the pandemic, and it took months, but after being there and away from here for so many months it really-- when you experience other cultures, it makes you appreciate and also find things you don't like about your own culture. But I feel like having perspective is what inspires me. Katty: Love that, and for creativity to bloom, do you need that spark of inspiration for creativity to happen, or is there another thing you tap into when you sit down to write or to do another wireframe or to create, what would you tap into for that? Jaime: I don't know, I wish I could answer that. I don't know. I spend my days at the computer then I go and walk on a trail. It's extremely important for me to get out and walk in nature and I do that every day and I listen to the same 3 podcasts. The New York Times Day thing, The Berlin Briefing, and then Doug Rushkoff's Team Human And that stuff, while I'm like in nature and walking around listening to these podcasts, again, I guess I feel transported and I feel immersed. I think that when I leave the house, and when I come back, whether I'm jogging or listening to music and weird experimental atonal music that nobody would like unless they're into weird music. That helps me really reset the crazy stuff we're telling ourselves in our head or just like being in a mundane moment. I think sitting at a computer for more than four hours, not healthy for me.   Katty: I love that. Both for creativity and inspiration, it's not going to happen nine to five necessarily looking at a little screen. To be able to get out of this and just get other influences. I find nature so healing in so many ways and my ideation just goes off the roof when I'm out and about. Jaime: Where do you go, where do you get your nature?  Katty: My favorite place is Point Doom in Malibu. It's a very easy little hike, but you are at eye level of the pelicans flying by. It's just the most incredible sensation sitting there and you see these majestic birds flying right at your eye level. So whenever I can, whether it's a birthday or an anniversary or something special, that's where I like to go.    Jaime: Nice. Yeah.   Katty: Well Jamie where can people find you?   Jaime: People can find me on LinkedIn, @Jaimerlevy. I'm on Twitter, I'm not tweeting so much. I was told I need to get on Instagram but I'm like, “What?”. And then Jaimelevy.com and then the book userexperiencestrategy.com. I'd love to just mention if people don't like to go walk in nature. I recorded my audible book at this great studio in the valley, where I grew up, and it's me reading my book and doing some impressions of myself, and it's a lot of stories and so far the reviews have been really favorable. And so if you're not a big reader like me I hate it, I don't really like reading. I can read an article but long-format, not so good. Check out my audible book if you're not sure go to userexperiencestrategy.com and listen to the first two chapters and try it on. But I'm really excited about the audible, you know for my book I self-produced it, paid for it, and it's mine. So that was important to me, you know.      

02:13 - Michael’s Superpower: Being Able to Creatively Digest and Reconstruct Categories * Integral Theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_theory_(Ken_Wilber)) * Creative Deconstruction – Michael Schwartz (https://ideas.repec.org/f/psc306.html) * Creating Truly Novel Categories – Recognizing Novelty as Novelty 09:39 - Recognizing Economic Value of Talents & Abilities * Invisible Labor * Ecosystem Services * Biodiversity; The Diversity Bonus by Scott Page (https://www.amazon.com/Diversity-Bonus-Knowledge-Compelling-Interests/dp/0691176884) 18:49 - The Edge of Chaos; Chaos Theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory) * “Life exists at the edge of chaos.” 23:23 - Reproducibility Crisis and Context-Dependent Insight 28:49 - What constitutes a scientific experiment? * Missed Externalities * Scholarly articles for Michelle Girvan "reservoir computing" (https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Michelle+Girvan+reservoir+computing&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart) * Non-conformity 38:03 - The Return of Civil Society and Community Relationships; Scale Theory * Legitimation Crisis by Juergen Habermas (https://www.amazon.com/Legitimation-Crisis-Juergen-Habermas/dp/0807015210) * Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies by Geoffrey West (https://www.amazon.com/Scale-Universal-Organisms-Cities-Companies-ebook/dp/B010P7Z8J0) 49:28 - Fractal Geometry More amazing resources from Michael to check out: Michael Garfield: Improvising Out of Algorithmic Isolation (https://blog.usejournal.com/improvising-out-of-algorithmic-isolation-7ef1a5b94697?gi=e731ad1488b2) Michael Garfield: We Will Fight Diseases of Our Networks By Realizing We Are Networks (https://michaelgarfield.medium.com/we-will-fight-diseases-of-our-networks-by-realizing-we-are-networks-7fa1e1c24444) Reflections: Jacob: Some of the best ideas, tv shows, music, etc. are the kinds of things that there’s not going to be an established container. Rein: “Act always so as to increase the number of choices.” ~ Heinz von Foerster Jessica: Externality. Recognize that there’s going to be surprises and find them. Michael: Adaptability is efficiency aggregated over a longer timescale. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: JACOB: Hello and welcome to Episode 234 of Greater Than Code. My name is Jacob Stoebel and I’m joined with my co-panelist, Rein Henrichs. REIN: Thanks, Jacob and I’m here with my friend and co-panelist, Jessica Kerr. JESSICA: Thanks, Rein and today, I’m excited to introduce our guest, Michael Garfield. He’s an artist and philosopher and he helps people navigate our age of accelerating weirdness and cultivate the curiosity and play we need to thrive. He hosts and produces two podcasts, The Future Fossils Podcast & The Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Podcast. Yay, complexity! Michael acts as interlocutor for a worldwide community of artists, scientists, and philosophers—a practice that feeds his synthetic and transdisciplinary “mind-jazz” performances in the form of essay, avant-guitar music, and painting! You can find him on Bandcamp, it’s pretty cool. Refusing to be enslaved by a single perspective, creative medium, or intellectual community, Michael walks through the walls between academia and festival culture, theory and practice. Michael, welcome to Greater Than Code! MICHAEL: Thanks! I’m glad to be here and I hope that I provide a refreshingly different guest experience for listeners being not a coder in any kind of traditional sense. JESSICA: Yet you’re definitely involved in technology. MICHAEL: Yeah, and I think the epistemic framing of programming and algorithms is something that can be applied with no understanding of programming languages as they are currently widely understood. It’s just like design is coding, design of the built environment, so. JESSICA: And coding is a design. MICHAEL: Indeed. JESSICA: Okay, before we go anywhere else, I did not prepare you for this, but we have one question that we ask all of our guests. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it? MICHAEL: I would like believe that I have a superpower in being able to creatively digest and reconstruct categories so as to drive new associations between them for people and I feel like I developed that studying integral theory in grad school. I did some work under Sean Esbjörn-Hargens at John F. Kennedy University looking at the work of and work adjacent to Ken Wilber, who was trying to come up with a metatheoretical framework to integrate all different domains of human knowledge. All different types of inquiry into a single framework that doesn't attempt to reduce any one of them to any other and then in that process, I learned what one of my professors, Michael Schwartz, called creative deconstruction. So showing how art can be science and science can be art and that these aren't ontologically fixed categories that exist external to us. Looking at the relationship between science as a practice and spiritual inquiry as a practice and that kind of thing. So it's an irreverent attitude toward the categories that we've constructed that takes in a way a cynical and pragmatic approach to the way that we define things in our world. You know. REIN: Kant was wrong. [laughs] MICHAEL: It's good to get out of the rut. Obviously, you’ve got to be careful because all of these ideas have histories and so you have to decide whether it's worth trying to redefine something for people in order to open up new possibilities in the way that these ideas can be understood and manipulated. It's not, for example, an easy task to try and get people to change their idea about what religion is. [laughs] JESSICA: Yeah. More than redefined. It's almost like undefined. MICHAEL: Hm. Like Paul Tillich, for example. Theologian Paul Tillich said that religion is ultimate concern. So someone can have a religion of money, or a religion of sex, but if you get into these, if you try to interpose that in a debate on intelligent design versus evolutionary theory, you'll get attacked by both sides. JESSICA: [chuckles] That’s cosmology. MICHAEL: Yeah. So it's like – [overtalk] JESSICA: Which is hard to [inaudible] of money, or sex. MICHAEL: Yeah, but people do it anyhow. JESSICA: [laughs] Yeah. So deconstructing categories and seeing in-between things that fits through your walking through walls, what categories are you deconstructing and seeing between lately? MICHAEL: Well, I don't know, lately I've been paying more attention to the not so much tilting after the windmills of this metamorphic attitude towards categories, but looking at the way that when the opportunity comes to create a truly novel category, what are the forces in play that prevent that, that prevent recognizing novelty as novelty that I just – JESSICA: Do you have any examples? MICHAEL: Yeah, well, I just saw a really excellent talk by UC Berkeley Professor Doug Guilbeault, I think is how you say his name. I am happy to link his work to you all in the chat here so that you can share it. JESSICA: Yeah, we’ll link that in the show notes. MICHAEL: He studies category formation and he was explaining how most of the research that's been done on convergent categorization is done on established categories. But what happens when you discover something truly new? What his research shows is that basically the larger the population, the more likely it is that these categories will converge on something that's an existing category and he compared it to island versus mainland population biogeography. So there's a known dynamic in evolutionary science where genetic drift, which is just this random component of the change in allele frequencies in a population, the larger the population, the less likely it is that a genetic mutation that is otherwise neutral is going to actually percolate out into the population. On an island, you might get these otherwise neutral mutations that actually take root and saturate an entire community, but on the mainland, they get lost in the noise. You can look at this in terms of how easy it is for an innovative, artistic, or musical act to actually find any purchase. Like Spotify bought the data analysis company, The Echo Nest, back in 2015 and they ran this study on where emergent musical talent comes from. It comes from places like Australia, the UK, and Iceland, because the networks are small enough. This is a finding that's repeated endlessly through studies of how to create a viral meme that basically, or another way – JESSICA: You mean a small enough pool to take hold? MICHAEL: Yeah. That basically big science and large social networks online and these other attempts, anywhere we look at this economies of scale, growing a given system, what happens is—and we were talking about this a little before we got on the call—as a system scales, it becomes less innovative. There's less energy is allocated to – JESSICA: In America? MICHAEL: Yeah. Bureaucratic overhead, latencies in the network that prevent the large networks from adapting, with the same agility to novel challenges. There's a lot of different ways to think about this and talk about this, but it basically amounts to, if you want to, you can't do it from the conservative core of an organization. You can't do it from the board of directors. JESSICA: Oh. MICHAEL: You have to go out onto – like why did they call it fringe physics? It's like, it is because it's on the fringe and so there's a kind of – JESSICA: So this would be like if you have like one remarkably lowercase agile team inside your enterprise, one team is innovating and development practices. They're going to get mushed out. Whereas, if you have one team innovating like that in a small company, it might spread and it might become dominant. MICHAEL: Yeah. I think it's certainly the case that this speaks to something I've been wondering about it in a broader sense, which is how do we recognize the economic value of talents and abilities that are like, how do we recognize a singular individual for their incompressible knowledge and expertise when they don't go through established systems of accreditation like getting a PhD? Because the academic system is such that basically, if you have an innovative contribution, but you don't have the credentials that are required to participate in the community of peer review, then people can't even – your contribution is just invisible. The same is true for how long it took, if you look at economic models, it took so long for economic models to even begin to start addressing the invisible labor of women in at home like domestic labor, or what we're now calling ecosystem services. So there's this question of – I should add that I'm ambivalent about this question because I'm afraid that answering it in an effective way, how do we make all of these things economically visible would just accelerate the rate at which the capitalist machine is capable of co-opting and exploiting all of these. [chuckles] REIN: Yeah. You also have this Scott Seeing Like a State thing where in order to be able to even perceive that that stuff is going on, it has to become standardized and you can't dissect the bird to observe its song, right? MICHAEL: Totally. So obviously, it took almost no time at all for consumer culture to commodify the psychedelic experience and start using to co-opt this psychedelic aesthetic and start using it in advertising campaigns for Levi's Jeans and Campbell Soup and that kind of thing. So it’s this question of a moving frontier that as soon as you have the language to talk about it, it's not the ineffable anymore. REIN: Yeah. MICHAEL: There's a value to the ineffable and there's a value to – it's related to this question of the exploitation of indigenous peoples by large pharmaceutical companies like, their ethnobotanical knowledge. How do you make the potential value of biodiversity, something that can be manufactured into medicine at scale, without destroying the rainforest and the people who live in it? Everywhere I look, I see this question. So for me, lately, it's been less about how do we creatively deconstruct the categories we have so much as it is, what is the utility of not knowing how to categorize something at all and then how do we fix the skewed incentive structures in society so as to value that which we currently do not know how to value. JESSICA: Because you don’t have a category for it. MICHAEL: Right. Like right now, maybe one of the best examples, even though this is the worst example in another way, is that a large fraction of the human genome has been patented by Monsanto, even though it has no known current biomedical utility. This is what Lewis Hyde in his book, Common as Air, called “the third enclosure” of the common. So you have the enclosure of the land that everyone used to be able to hunt on and then you have the enclosure of intellectual property in terms of patents for known utilities, known applications, and then over the last few decades, you're starting to see large companies buy their way into and defend patents for the things that actually don't – it's speculative. They're just gambling on the idea that eventually we'll have some use for this and that it's worth lawyering up to defend that potential future use. But it's akin to recognizing that we need to fund translational work. We need to fund synthesis. We need to fund blue sky interdisciplinary research for which we don't have an expected return on investment here because there's – JESSICA: It's one of those things that it’s going to help; you're going to get tremendous benefits out of it, but you can't say which ones. MICHAEL: Right. It's a shift perhaps akin to the move that I'm seeing conservation biology make right now from “let's preserve this charismatic species” to “let's do everything we can to restore biodiversity” rather than that biodiversity itself is generative and should be valued in its own regard so diverse research teams, diverse workplace teams. We know that there is what University of Michigan Professor Scott Page calls the diversity bonus and you don't need to know and in fact, you cannot know what the bonus is upfront. JESSICA: Yeah. You can't draw the line of causality forward to the benefit because the point of diversity is that you get benefits you never thought of. MICHAEL: Exactly. Again, this gets into this question of as a science communications staffer in a position where I'm constantly in this weird dissonant enters zone between the elite researchers at the Santa Fe Institute where I work and the community of complex systems enthusiasts that have grown up around this organization. It's a complete mismatch in scale between this org that has basically insulated itself so as to preserve the island of innovation that is required for really groundbreaking research, but then also, they have this reputation that far outstrips their ability to actually respond to people that are one step further out on the fringe from them. So I find myself asking, historically SFI was founded by Los Alamos National Laboratory physicists mostly that were disenchanted with the idea that they were going to have to research science, that their science was limited to that which could be basically argued as a national defense initiative and they just wanted to think about the deepest mysteries of the cosmos. So what is to SFI as SFI as to Los Alamos? Even in really radical organizations, there's a point at which they've matured and there are questions that are beyond the horizon of that which a particular community is willing to indulge. I find, in general, I'm really fascinated by questions about the nonlinearity of time, or about weird ontology. I'm currently talking to about a dozen other academics and para-academics about how to try and – I'm working, or helping to organize a working group of people that can apply rigorous academic approaches to asking questions that are completely taboo inside of academia. Questions that challenge some of the most fundamental assumptions of maternity, such as there being a distinction between self and other, or the idea that there are things that are fundamentally inaccessible to quantitative research. These kinds of things like, how do we make space for that kind of inquiry when there's absolutely no way to argue it in terms of you should fund this? And that's not just for money, that's also for attention because the demands on the time and attention of academics are so intense that even if they have interest in this stuff, they don't have the freedom to pursue it in their careers. That's just one of many areas where I find that this kind of line of inquiry manifesting right now. REIN: Reminds me a lot of this model of the edge of chaos that came from Packard and Langton back in the late 70s. Came out of chaos theory, this idea that there's this liminal transitionary zone between stability and chaos and that this is the boiling zone where self-organization happens and innovation happens. But also, that this zone is itself not static; it gets pushed around by other forces. MICHAEL: Yeah, and that's where life is and that was Langton's point, that life exists at the edge of chaos that it's right there at the phase transition boundary between what is it that separates a stone from a raging bonfire, or there’s the Goldilocks Zone kind of question. Yeah, totally. REIN: And these places that were at the edge of chaos that were innovative can ossify, they can move into the zone of stability. It's not so much that they move it's that, I don't know, maybe it's both. Where the frontier is, is constantly in motion. MICHAEL: Yeah, and to that point again, I tend to think about these things in a topographical, or geographical sense, where the island is growing, we're sitting on a volcano, and there's lots you can do with that metaphor. Obviously, it doesn't make sense. You can't build your house inside the volcano, right? [laughs] But you want to be close enough to be able to watch and describe as new land erupts, but at a safe distance. Where is that sweet spot where you have rigor and you have support, but you're not trapped within a bureaucracy, or an ossified set of institutional conventions? JESSICA: Or if the island is going up, if the earth is moving the island up until the coastline keeps expanding outward, and you built your house right on the beach. As in you’ve got into React when it was the new hotness and you learned all about it and you became the expert and then you had this great house on the beach, and now you have a great house in the middle of town because the frontier, the hotness has moved on as our massive technology has increased and the island raises up. I mean, you can't both identify as being on the edge and identify with any single category of knowledge. MICHAEL: Yeah. It's tricky. I saw Nora Bateson talking about this on Twitter recently. She's someone who I love for her subversiveness. Her father, Gregory Bateson, was a major player in the articulation of cybernetics and she's awesome in that sense of, I don't know, the minister's daughter kind of a way of being extremely well-versed in complex systems thinking and yet also aware that there's a subtle reductionism that comes in that misses – JESSICA: Misses from? MICHAEL: Well, that comes at like we think about systems thinking as it's not reductionist because it's not trying to explain biology in terms of the interactions of atoms. It acknowledges that there's genuine emergence that happens at each of these levels and yet, to articulate that, one of the things that happens is everything has to be squashed into numbers and so it’s like this issue of how do you quantify something. JESSICA: It's not real, if you can't measure it in numbers. MICHAEL: Right and that belies this bias towards thinking that because you can't quantify something now means it can't be quantified. JESSICA: You can’t predict which way the flame is going to go in the fire. That doesn't mean the fire doesn't burn. [chuckles] MICHAEL: Right. So she's interesting because she talks about warm data as this terrain, or this experience where we don't know how to talk about it yet, but that's actually what makes it so juicy and meaningful and instructive and – JESSICA: As opposed to taking it out of context. Leave it in context, even though we don't know how to do some magical analysis on it there. MICHAEL: Right, and I think this starts to generate some meaningful insights into the problem of the reproducibility crisis. Just as an example, I think science is generally moving towards context dependent insight and away from – even at the Santa Fe Institute, nobody's looking for a single unifying theory of everything anymore. It's far more illuminating, useful, and rigorous to look at how different models are practical given different applications. I remember in college there's half a dozen major different ways to define a biological species and I was supposed to get up in front of a class and argue for one over the other five. I was like, “This is preposterous.” Concretely, pun kind of intended, Biosphere 2, which was this project that I know the folks here at Synergia Ranch in Santa Fe at the Institute of Ecotechnics, who were responsible for creating this unbelievable historic effort to miniaturize the entire biosphere inside of a building. They had a coral reef and a rainforest and a Savannah and a cloud desert, like the Atacama, and there was one other, I forget. But it was intended as a kind of open-ended ecological experiment that was supposed to iterate a 100 times, or 50 times over a 100 years. They didn't know what they were looking for; they just wanted to gather data and then continue these 2-year enclosures where a team of people were living inside this building and trying to reproduce the entire earth biosphere in miniature. So that first enclosure is remembered historically as a failure because they miscalculated the rate at which they would be producing carbon dioxide and they ended up having to open the building and let in fresh air and import resource. JESSICA: So they learned something? MICHAEL: Right, they learned something. But that project was funded by Ed Bass, who in 1994, I think called in hostile corporate takeover expert, Steve Bannon to force to go in there with a federal team and basically issue a restraining order on these people and forcibly evict them from the experiment that they had created. Because it was seen as an embarrassment, because they had been spun in this way in international media as being uncredentialed artists, rather than scientists who really should not have the keys to this thing. It was one of these instances where people regard this as a scientific failure and yet when you look at the way so much of science is being practiced now, be it in the domains of complex systems, or in machine learning, what they were doing was easily like 20 or 30 years ahead of its time. JESSICA: Well, no wonder they didn’t appreciate it. MICHAEL: [chuckles] Exactly. So it's like, they went in not knowing what they were going to get out of it, but there was this tragic mismatch between the logic of Ed Bass’ billionaire family about what it means to have a return on an investment and the logic of ecological engineering where you're just poking at a system to see what will happen and you don't even know where to set the controls yet. So anyway. JESSICA: And it got too big. You talked about the media, it got too widely disseminated and became embarrassed because it wasn't on an island. It wasn't in a place where the genetic drift can become normal. MICHAEL: Right. It was suddenly subject to the constraints imposed upon it in terms of the way that people were being taught science in public school in the 1980s that this is what the scientific method is. You start with a hypothesis and it's like what if your – JESSICA: Which are not standards that are relevant to that situation. MICHAEL: Exactly. And honestly, the same thing applies to other computational forms of science. It took a long time for the techniques pioneered at the Santa Fe Institute to be regarded as legitimate. I'm thinking of cellular automata, agent-based modeling, and computer simulation generally. Steven Wolfram did a huge service, in some sense, to the normalization of those things in publishing A New Kind of Science, that massive book in whatever it was, 2004, or something where he said, “Look, we can run algorithmic experiments,” and that's different from the science that you're familiar with, but it's also setting aside for a moment, the attribution failure that that book is and acknowledging who actually pioneered A New Kind of Science. [chuckles] JESSICA: At least it got some information out. MICHAEL: Right. At least it managed to shift the goalpost in terms of what the expectations are; what constitutes a scientific experiment in the first place. JESSICA: So it shifted categories. MICHAEL: Yeah. So I think about, for example, a research that was done on plant growth in a basement. I forget who it was that did this. I think I heard this from, it was either Doug Rushkoff, or Charles Eisenstein that was talking about this, where you got two completely different results and they couldn't figure out what was going on. And then they realized that it was at different moments in the lunar cycle and that it didn't matter if you put your plant experiment in a basement and lit everything with artificial bulbs and all this stuff. Rather than sunlight, rather than clean air, if you could control for everything, but that there's always a context outside of your context. So this notion that no matter how cleverly you try to frame your model, that when it comes time to actually experiment on these things in the real world, that there's always going to be some extra analogy you've missed and that this has real serious and grave implications in terms of our economic models, because there will always be someone that's falling through the cracks. How do we actually account for all of the stakeholders in conversations about the ecological cost of dropping a new factory over here, for example? It's only recently that people, anywhere in the modern world, are starting to think about granting ecosystems legal protections as entities befitting of personhood and this kind of thing. JESSICA: Haven’t we copyrighted those yet? MICHAEL: [laughs] So all of that, there's plenty of places to go from there, I'm sure. REIN: Well, this does remind me of one of the things that Stafford Beer tried was he said, “Ponds are viable systems, they’re ecologies, they're adaptive, they're self-sustaining. Instead of trying to model how a pond works, what if we just hook the inputs of the business process into the pond and then hook the adaptions made by the pond as the output back into the business process and use the pond as the controlling system without trying to understand what makes a pond good at adapting?” That is so outside of the box and it blows my mind that he was doing this, well, I guess it was the 60s, or whatever, but this goes well beyond black boxing, right? MICHAEL: Yeah. So there's kind of a related insight that I saw Michelle Girvan gave at Santa Fe Institute community lecture a few years ago on reservoir computing, which maybe most of your audience is familiar with, but just for the sake of it, this is joining a machine learning system to a source of analog chaos, basically. So putting a computer on a bucket of water and then just kicking the bucket, every once in a while, to generate waves so that you're feeding chaos into the output of the machine learning algorithm to prevent overfitting. Again, and again, and again, you see this value where this is apparently the evolutionary value of play and possibly also, of dreaming. There's a lot of good research on both of these areas right now that learning systems are all basically hill climbing algorithms that need to be periodically disrupted from climbing the wrong local optimum. So in reservoir computing, by adding a source of natural chaos to their weather prediction algorithms, they were able to double the horizon at which they were able to forecast meteorological events past the mathematic limit that had been proven and established for this. That is like, we live in a noisy world. JESSICA: Oh, yeah. Just because it’s provably impossible doesn't mean we can't do something that's effectively the same thing, that's close enough. MICHAEL: Right. Actually, in that example, I think that there's a strong argument for the value of that which we can't understand. [laughs] It's like it's actually important. So much has been written about the value of Slack, of dreaming, of taking a long walk, of daydreaming, letting your mind wander to scientific discovery. So this is where great innovations come from is like, “I'm going to sleep on it,” or “I'm going to go on vacation.” Just getting stuck on an idea, getting fixated on a problem, we actually tend to foreclose on the possibility of answering that problem entirely. Actually, there's a good reason to – I think this is why Silicon Valley has recognized the instrumental value of microdosing, incidentally. [laughs] That this is that you actually want to inject a little noise into your algorithm and knock yourself off the false peak that you've stranded yourself on. JESSICA: Because if you aim for predictability and consistency, if you insist on reasonableness, you'll miss everything interesting. MICHAEL: Or another good way to put it is what is it, reasonable women don't make history. [laughs] There is actually a place for the – JESSICA: You don’t change the system by maximally conforming. MICHAEL: Right. JESSICA: If there is a place for… MICHAEL: It’s just, there is a place for non-conformity and it's a thing where it's like, I really hope and I have some optimism that what we'll see, by the time my daughter is old enough to join the workforce, is that we'll see a move in this direction where non-conformity has been integrated somehow into our understanding of how to run a business that we actively seek out people that are capable of doing this. For the same reason that we saw over the 20th century, we saw a movement from one size fits all manufacturing to design your own Nike shoes. There's this much more bespoke approach. JESSICA: Oh, I love those. MICHAEL: Yeah. So it's like we know that if we can tailor our systems so that they can adapt across multiple different scales, that they're not exploiting economies of scale that ultimately slash the redundancy that allows an organization to adapt to risk. That if we can find a way to actually generate a kind of a fractal structure in the governance of organizations in the way that we have reflexes. The body already does this, you don't have to sit there and think about everything you do and if you did, you’d die right away. JESSICA: [laughs] Yeah. REIN: Yeah. MICHAEL: If you had to pass every single twitch all the way up the chain to your frontal cortex JESSICA: If we had to put breathe on the list. [laughs] MICHAEL: Right. If you had to sit there and approve every single heartbeat, you'd be so dead. [overtalk] JESSICA: Oh my gosh, yeah. That's an energy allocation and it all needs to go through you so that you can have control. REIN: I just wanted to mention, that reminded me of a thing that Klaus Krippendorff, who's a cybernetics guy, said that there is virtue in the act of delegating one's agency to trustworthy systems. We're talking, but I don't need to care about how the packets get from my machine to yours and I don't want to care about that, but there's a trade-off here where people find that when they surrender their agency, that this can be oppressive. So how do we find this trade-off? MICHAEL: So just to anchor it again in something that I find really helpful. Thinking about the way that convenience draws people into these compacts, with the market and with the state. You look over the last several hundred years, or thousand years in the West and you see more and more of what used to be taken for granted as the extent in terms of the functions that are performed by the extended family, or by the neighborhood, life in a city, by your church congregations, or whatever. All of that stuff has been out boarded to commercial interests and to federal level oversight, because it's just more efficient to do it that way at the timescales that matter, that are visible to those systems. Yet, what COVID has shown us is that we actually need neighborhoods that suddenly, it doesn't – my wife and I, it was easy to make the decision to move across country to a place where we didn't know anybody to take a good job. But then suddenly when you're just alone in your house all the time and you've got nobody to help you raise your kids, that seems extremely dumb. So there's that question of just as I feel like modern science is coming back around to acknowledging that a lot of what was captured in old wives’ tales and in traditional indigenous knowledge, ecological knowledge systems that were regarded by the enlightenment as just rumor, or… JESSICA: Superstition. MICHAEL: Superstition, that it turns out that these things actually had, that they had merit, they were evolved. JESSICA: There was [inaudible] enough. MICHAEL: Right. Again, it wasn't rendered in the language that allowed it to be the subject of quantitative research until very recently and then, suddenly it was and suddenly, we had to circle back around. Science is basically in this position where they have to sort of canonize Galileo, they're like, “Ah, crap. We burned all these witches, but it turns out they were right.” There's that piece of it. So I think relatedly, one of the things that we're seeing in economist samples and Wendy Carlin have written about this is the return of the civil society, the return of mutual aid networks, and of gift economies, and of the extended family, and of buildings that are built around in courtyards rather than this Jeffersonian everyone on their own plot of land approach. That we're starting to realize that we had completely emptied out the topsoil basically of all of these community relationships in order to standardize things for a mass big agricultural approach, that on the short scale actually does generate greater yield. It's easier to have conversations with people who agree with you than it is – in a way, it's inexpedient to try and cross the aisle and have a conversation with someone with whom you deeply and profoundly disagree. But the more polarized we become as a civilization, the more unstable we become as a civilization. So over this larger timescale, we actually have to find ways to incentivize talking to people with whom you disagree, or we're screwed. We're kicking legs out from under the table. REIN: At this point, I have to name drop Habermas because he had this idea that there were two fundamental cognitive interests that humans have to direct their attempts to acquire knowledge. One is a technical interest in achieving goals through prediction and control and the other is a practical interest in ensuring mutual understanding. His analysis was that advanced capitalist societies, the technical interest dominates at the expense of the practical interest and that knowledge produced by empirical, scientific, analytic sciences becomes the prototype of all knowledge. I think that's what you're talking about here that we've lost touch with this other form of knowledge. It's not seen as valuable and the scientific method, the analytical approaches have come to dominate. MICHAEL: Yeah, precisely. [laughs] Again, I think in general, we've become impoverished in our imagination because again, the expectations, there's a shifting baseline. So what people expect to pull out of the ocean now is a fish that you might catch off just a commercial, or a recreational fishing expedition. It's a quarter of the size of the same species of fish you might've caught 50, 70 years ago and when people pull up this thing and they're like, “Oh, look at –” and they feel proud of themselves. I feel like that's what's going on with us in terms of our we no longer even recognize, or didn't until very recently recognize that we had been unwittingly colluding in the erosion of some very essential levels of organization and human society and that we had basically sold our souls to market efficiency and efficient state level governance. Now it's a huge mess to try and understand. You look at Occupy Wall Street and stuff like that and it just seems like such an enormous pain in the ass to try and process things in that way. But it's because we're having to relearn how to govern neighborhoods and govern small communities and make business decisions at the scale of a bioregion rather than a nation. JESSICA: Yeah. It's a scale thing. I love the phrase topsoil of community relationships, because when you talk about the purposive knowledge that whatever you call it, Rein, that is goal seeking. It's like the one tall tree that is like, “I am the tallest tree,” and it keeps growing taller and taller and taller, and it doesn't see that it's falling over because there's no trees next to it to protect it from the wind. It's that weaving together between all the trees and the different knowledge and the different people, our soul is there. Our resilience is there. REIN: Michael, you keep talking about scale. Are you talking about scale theory? MICHAEL: Yeah. Scaling laws, like Geoffrey West's stuff, Luis Bettencourt is another researcher at the University of Chicago who does really excellent work in urban scaling. I just saw a talk from him this morning that was really quite interesting about there being a sweet spot where a city can exist between how thinly it's distributed infrastructurally over a given area versus how congested it is. Because population and infrastructure scale differently, they scale at different rates than you get – REIN: If I remember my West correctly, just because I suspect that not all of our listeners are familiar with scale theory, there's this idea that there are certain things that grow super linearly as things scale and certain things that grow sub linearly. So for example, the larger a city gets, you get a 15% more restaurants, but you also get 15% more flu, but you also get 15% less traffic. MICHAEL: Yeah. So anything that depends on infrastructures scales sub linearly. A city of 2 million people has 185% the number of gas stations, but anything that scales anything having to do with the number of interactions between people scales super linearly. You get 115% of the – rather you get, what is it, 230%? Something like that. Anyway, it's 150%, it's 85% up versus 115% up. So patents, but also crime and also, just the general pace of life scale at 115% per capita. So like, disease transmission. So you get into these weird cases—and this links back to what we were talking about earlier—where people move into the city, because it's per unit. In a given day, you have so much more choice, you have so much more opportunity than you would in your agrarian Chinese community and that's why Shenzhen is basically two generations old. 20 million people and none of them have grandparents living in Shenzhen because they're all attracted to this thing. But at scale, what that means is that everyone is converging on the same answer. Everyone's moving into Shenzhen and away from their farming community. So you end up – in a way, it's not that that world is any more innovative. It's just, again, easier to capture that innovation and therefore, measure it. But then back to what we were saying about convergent categories and biogeography, it's like if somebody comes up with a brilliant idea in the farm, you're not necessarily going to see it. But if somebody comes up with the same brilliant idea in the city, you might also not see it for different reasons. So anyway, I'm in kind of a ramble, but. JESSICA: The optimal scale for innovation is not the individual and it's not 22 million, it's in between. MICHAEL: Well, I feel like at the level of a city, you're no longer talking about individuals almost in a way. At that point, you're talking about firms. A city is like a rainforest in which the fauna are companies. Whereas, a neighborhood as an ecosystem in which the fauna, or individual people and so, to equate one with the other is a potential point of confusion. Maybe an easier way to think about this would be multicellular life. My brain is capable of making all kinds of innovations that any cell, or organ in my body could not make on its own. There's a difference there. [overtalk] JESSICA: [inaudible]. MICHAEL: Right. It's easier, however, for a cell to mutate if it doesn't live inside of me. Because if it does, it's the cancer – [overtalk] JESSICA: The immune system will come attack it. MICHAEL: Right. My body will come and regulate that. JESSICA: Like, “You’re different, you are right out.” MICHAEL: Yeah. So it's not about innovation as some sort of whole category, again, it's about different kinds of innovation that are made that are emergent at different levels of organization. It's just the question of what kinds of innovation are made possible when you have something like the large Hadron Collider versus when you've got five people in a room around a pizza. You want to find the appropriate scale for the entity, for the system that's the actual level of granularity at which you're trying to look at the stuff, so. REIN: Can I try to put a few things together here in potentially a new way and see if it's anything? So we talked about the edge of chaos earlier and we're talking about scale theory now, and in both, there's this idea of fractal geometry. This idea that a coastline gets larger, the smaller your ruler is. In scale theory, there's this idea of space filling that you have to fill the space with things like capillaries, or roads and so on. But in the human lung, for example, if you unfurled all of the surface area, you'd fill up like a football field, I think. So maybe there's this idea that there's complexity that's possible, that’s made possible by the fractal shape of this liminal region that the edge of chaos. MICHAEL: Yeah. It's certainly, I think as basically what it is in maximizing surface area, like you do within a lung, then you're maximizing exposure. So if the scientific community were operating on the insights that it has generated in a deliberate way, then you would try to find a way to actually incorporate the fringe physics community. There's got to be a way to use that as the reservoir of chaos, rather than trying to shut that chaos out of your hill climbing algorithm and then at that point, it's just like, where's the threshold? How much can you invite before it becomes a distraction from getting anything done? When it's too noisy to be coherent. Arguably, what the internet has done for humankind has thrown it in completely the opposite direction where we've optimized entirely for surface area instead of for coherence. So now we have like, no two people seem to be able to agree on reality anymore. That's not useful either. REIN: Maybe there's also a connectivity thing here where if I want to get from one side of the city to the other, there are 50 different routes. But if I want to get from one city to another, there's a highway that does it. MICHAEL: Yeah, totally. So it's just a matter of rather than thinking about what allows for the most efficient decisions, in some sense, at one given timescale, it's how can we design hierarchical information, aggregation structures so as to create a wise balance between the demands on efficiency that are held at and maintained at different scales. SFI researcher, Jessica Flack talks about this in her work on collective computation and primate hierarchies where it’s a weird, awkward thing, but basically, there is an evolutionary argument for police, that it turns out that having a police system is preventing violence. This is mathematically demonstrable, but you also have to make sure that there's enough agency at the individual level, in the system that the police aren't in charge of everything going on. It's not just complex, it's complicated. [laughs] We've thrown out a ton of stuff on this call. I don't know, maybe this is just whetting people's appetite for something a little bit more focused and concise. JESSICA: This episode is going to have some extensive show notes. MICHAEL: Yeah. [chuckles] JESSICA: It's definitely time to move into reflections. JACOB: You were talking, at the very beginning, about Spotify. Like how, when unknown ideas are able to find their tribe and germinate. I was reading about how Netflix does business and it's very common for them to make some new content and then see how it goes for 30 days and then just kill it. Because they say, “Well, this isn't taking off. We're not going to make more of it,” and a lot of people can get really upset with that. There's definitely been some really great things out on Netflix that I'm like, for one on the one hand, “Why are you canceling this? I really wanted more,” and it seems like there's a lot of the people that do, too. What that's making me think about as well for one thing, I think it seems like Netflix from my experience, is not actually marketing some of their best stuff. You would never know it’s there, just in the way of people to find more unknown things. But also, I'm thinking about how just generally speaking some of the best ideas, TV shows, music, whatever are the kinds of things that there's not going to be an established container, group of people, that you can say, “We want to find white men ages 25 to 35 and we're going to dump it on their home screen because if anyone's going to like it, it's them and if they do, then we keep it and if they don't move, we don't.” I feel like the best things are we don't actually know who those groups are going to be and it's going to have a weird constellation of people that I couldn't actually classify. So I was just thinking about how that's an interesting challenge. JESSICA: Sweet. Rein, you have a thing? REIN: Yeah. I have another thing. I was just reminded of von Foerster, who was one of the founders of Second-order cybernetics. He has an ethical imperative, which is act always so as to increase the number of choices. I think about this actually a lot in my day-to-day work about maximizing the option value that I carry with me as I'm doing my work, like deferring certain decisions and so on. But I think it also makes sense in our discussion as well. JESSICA: True. Mine is about externalities. We talked about how, whatever you do, whatever your business does, whatever your technology does, there's always going to be effects on the world on the context and the context of the context that you couldn't predict. That doesn't mean don't do anything. It doesn't mean look for those. Recognize that there's going to be surprises and try to find them. It reminds me of sometimes, I think in interviewing, we’re like, “There are cognitive biases so in order to be fair, we must not use human judgment!” [laughter] Which is not helpful. I mean, yes, there are cognitive biases so look for them and try to compensate. Don't try to use only something predictable, like an algorithm. That's not helpful. That's it. MICHAEL: Yeah. Just to speak to a little bit of what each of you have said, I think for me, one of the key takeaways here is that if you're optimizing for future opportunity, if you're trying to—and I think I saw MIT defined intelligence in this way, that AI could be measured in terms of its ability to – AGI rather could be measured in terms of its ability to increase the number of games steps available to it, or options available to it in the next step of an unfolding puzzle, or whatever. Superhuman AGI is going to break out of any kind of jail we try to put it in just because it's doing better at this. But the thing is that that's useless if we take it in terms of one spaciotemporal scale. Evolutionary dynamics have found a way to do this in a rainforest that optimizes biodiversity and the richness of feeding relationships in a food web without this short-sighted quarterly return maximizing type of approach. So the question is are you trying to create more opportunities for yourself right now? Are you trying to create more opportunities for your kids, or are you trying to transcend the rivalrous dynamics? You've set yourself up for intergenerational warfare if you pick only one of those. The tension between feed yourself versus feed your kids is resolved in a number of different ways in different species that have different – yeah. It is exactly, Rein in the chat you said, it reminds you of the trade-off between efficiency and adaptability and it's like, arguably, adaptability is efficiency aggregated when you're looking at it over a longer timescale, because you don't want to have to rebuild civilization from scratch. So [chuckles] I think it's just important to add the dimension of time and to consider that this is something that's going on at multiple different levels of organization at the same time and that's a hugely important to how we actually think about these topics. JESSICA: Thinking of scales of time, you’ve thought about these interesting topics for an hour, or so now and I hope you'll continue thinking about them over weeks and consult the show notes. Michael, how can people find out more about you? MICHAEL: I'm on Twitter and Instagram if people prefer diving in social media first, I don't recommend it. I would prefer you go to patreon.com/michaelgarfield and find future fossils podcasts there. I have a lot of other stuff I do, the music and the art and everything feeds into everything else. So because I'm a parent and because I don't want all of my income coming from my day job, I guess Patreon is where I suggest people go first. [laughs] Thank you. JESSICA: Thank you. And of course, to support the podcast, you can also go to patrion.com/greaterthancode. If you donate even a dollar, you can join our Slack channel and join the conversation. It'll be fun. Special Guest: Michael Garfield.

This week I talk play, innovation, noise, disruption, cryptocurrency, and trickster creativity with Michael Phillip, host of sister podcast Third Eye Drops, which I’m on A LOT – episodes 102, 88, 58, 44 with Doug Rushkoff, 38 with Niles Heckman, 28 with Bruce Damer, 21 with Erik Davis, 9 with Shane Mauss, 4 with Erik Davis, and this special mashup episode.  This one was originally recorded as Third Eye Drops Episode 239, but I went ahead and painstakingly edited out over ten minutes of filler language and head-scratching to give you the sharpest and most-polished conversation possible. If you appreciate these conversations and the extra work I put in to make them shine, please support Future Fossils on Patreon! Patrons gain access to over twenty secret episodes, unreleased music, our book club, and many other great things as they spill out of my overactive imagination. And if you’re broke as a joke, consider rating and reviewing Future Fossils on Apple Podcasts. It helps more than you know.We’d also love to have you in The Future Fossils Discord server, where you can find the others…Lastly, if you’re a podcaster, I recommend you get your show transcribed affordably at Podscribe.AI.Intro and outro music by Skytree.Michael Phillip has appeared on Future Fossils before:Episode 14 on WestworldEpisode 52 on Blockchain with Jennifer SodiniEpisode 67 on Magic & Media with Douglas RushkoffEpisode 135 on The Cosmic YesRelated External Sources:Buy all the books we talk about on this show from my Amazon Storefront.Lewis Hyde - Trickster Makes This WorldAndreas Wagner - Life Finds A WayAndreas Wagner - Arrival of the FittestRichard Dawkins - Climbing Mount ImprobableRichard Doyle - Darwin’s PharmacyWilliam Irwin Thompson - The Time Falling Bodies Take To LightAndreas Wagner at Nautilus - Why It Pays To Play Around(*I mistakenly said the article was published at Quanta)William Irwin Thompson et al. - The Lindisfarne TapesAdi Livnat - Simplification, Innateness, and the Absorption of Meaning from ContextPhil Ford’s Musicology Lectures on the Weird Studies PatreonWJT Mitchell - The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction(*I mistakenly said this was “Biomechanical Reproduction”)Chris Ryan - Tangentially Speaking 69 with Daniel VitalisJames Nestor - The Future of Breathing at The Long Now FoundationEvolutionary fitness landscapes visualized by @_baku89 on TwitterRelated Future Fossils/Michael Sources:MG - Cosmic Perspectives From A Fractal Planet (Burning Man 2013)MG - Advertisement is Psychedelic Art is Advertisement (2011)MG - We Will Fight Diseases of Our Networks by Realizing We Are Networks (2020)MG - “Ride It” music video (2005)Future Fossils 125 - Stuart Kauffman on Life, Physics, and the Adjacent PossibleFuture Fossils 160 - His Dark Materials: Narnia, Fillory, and Coming of Age in the Multiverse, with Stephen Hershey & Kynthia BrunetteFuture Fossils 159 - Michael Dowd on Post Doom: Life After Accepting Climate CatastropheComplexity Podcast 51 - Cris Moore on Algorithmic Justice & The Physics of InferenceAnd when you’re ready to switch it up, here are my music and listening recommendations on Spotify.If you're in a tipping mood:• Venmo: @futurefossils• PayPal.me/michaelgarfield• Patreon: patreon.com//michaelgarfield• BTC: 1At2LQbkQmgDugkchkP6QkDJCvJ5rv3Jm• ETH: 0x058aCaf2dd4DB222d89D65fdDF3f0500c5622448i Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I talk with Doug Rushkoff -  media analyst, prolific author, and host of the Team Human podcast - about how being human is the best strategy in an anti-human era.

Do billionaires worry about the future? Writer and futurist Doug Rushkoff learned fear of the future drives the 0.0001%ers too. Learn more about this episode at nextbillionseconds.com  

This podcast has featured some world-renowned guests, with more renown to come.Popular downloads include Dan Pink, multiple #1 bestseller, 40+ million TED talk views, Beth Comstock, former Vice Chair and CMO of General Electric, Marshall Goldsmith, #1 ranked leadership guru and author,Frances Hesselbein, Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree, Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Ken Blanchard, author, The One Minute Manager, over 13 million sold, Jonathan Haidt, #1 bestselling author, 8+ million TED talk views, Vincent Stanley, Director, Patagonia, David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, over 1 million sold, Dorie Clark, bestselling author, Jordan Harbinger, top 5 podcast, 4+ million monthly downloads, Doug Rushkoff, #1 bestselling author, producer, media theorist, Dave Asprey, founder Bulletproof, NY Times bestseller, Bryan Braman, Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagle, Marquis Flowers, Super Bowl highlight reel star New England Patriot, John Lee Dumas, top entrepreneurial podcaster, and more.Upcoming guests include an Olympic gold medalist, TED speakers with yet more views, and more. I'm speaking with a Victoria's Secret model and a Nobel laureate.I love meeting and talking to successful people who have overcome challenges, and I presume you do too, but I'm serving two goals:Materially measurable environmental resultsEmotional reward in doing so, meaning joy, discovery, meaning, purpose, and such as the leadership partI seek out renowned guests to achieve these goals. This episode explains the connection. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

You've heard that with social media, Google, and most free services, you're the product. The idea probably provoked thought when you heard it. Now it probably feels old, an ending point.What if you considered it a starting point? Where does it lead? What does it tell you about yourself, society, the internet, markets, humanity?Doug Rushkoff follows dozens of ideas like it and weaves them together into a tapestry of a new way of looking at media, individuality, advertising, algorithms, and more.For example: the internet began as a medium to unite people. Over and over its innovations with the most promise to bring people together instead came to separate us -- Google and Facebook being the biggest examples. They are now the greatest advertising media ever, increasingly getting in your business and personal life as much as you can. Their executives have to testify to Congress for undermining democracy.How did such results happen? What do they mean? What can we do about it?A few months ago friends started telling me to listen to Doug Rushkoff, because he talks about media like I do.It turns out after he wrote many bestselling books and a renowned podcast, just after I heard about him, he wrote a new book, Team Human, and was speaking a few blocks away from me, introduced by his friend and guest of this podcast Seth Godin.To prepare I listened to his podcast, which I loved, watched his TED talk, which got me thinking, and watched one of his several Frontline episodes, called Generation Like.Seth introduced us and here's the podcast.I appear at 48:25 on Team Human episode Book Launch: A Live Team Human Conversation with Douglas Rushkoff and Seth Godin. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week’s guest is Erik Davis – one of my great inspirations, someone who has influenced me and this podcast in immeasurable ways since I first encountered his amazing criticism, histories, and “seen it all” visionary cool – I still recommend his first nonfiction book (Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information) on a near-daily basis, and his show Expanding Mind has got to be my number one most-listened podcast of all time.Erik is a native Californian Gen X mystic who played no small part in the explosive West Coast visionary cyperpunk scene in the 1990s alongside folks like Terence McKenna, Timothy Leary, RU Sirius, Doug Rushkoff, and Jaron Lanier. But he’s taking a profoundly different stance these days, with a Religious Studies PhD in hand and a new book at the printers, drawing on his thirty-plus years experience investigating modern life’s weird marginalia to help us navigate a world in which the weird’s no longer marginal.https://techgnosis.comhttps://mitpress.mit.edu/books/high-weirdnessHigh Weirdness Drugs, Visions, and Esoterica in the Seventies by Erik Davis"A study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terrence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, High Weirdness charts the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 1970s. These three authors changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experienced reality— but how did their writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America? In High Weirdness, Erik Davis—America’s leading scholar of high strangeness—examines the published and unpublished writings of these vital, iconoclastic thinkers, as well as their own life-changing mystical experiences. Davis explores the complex lattice of the strange that flowed through America’s West Coast at a time of radical technological, political, and social upheaval to present a new theory of the weird as a viable mode for a renewed engagement with reality.""Erik Davis is an American journalist, critic, podcaster, and counter-public intellectual whose writings have run the gamut from rock criticism to cultural analysis to creative explorations of esoteric mysticism. He is the author of Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information, The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape, and Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica."We Discuss:Enacting the weird through mediaThe 1970s understood as the sort of beginning of our darker, weirder time - capitalism, consumer credit, surveillance, paranoia, density, historical dread…“The occult, conspiracy theory, a dark dreamlike character…is now central…the way fictions become operational as quasi-truths to navigate the post-truth environment…the popularity of psychedelics…”Key literacies for navigating Our Weird FutureSlender Man as operationalized fiction, as a kind of “tulpa” or thought-form activated into quasi-lifeThe intermarriage of reality and the hoaxHP Lovecraft’s modern distance from his horrors vs. Phil Dick’s postmodern intimacy with his horrorsThe Coming Age of DNA Monsters and Routinized Weirdness“We are called upon to analyze our resistances to all variety of shifts, mutations, couplings – and unless we want to go reactionary and hold onto certain ideas we have about how humans should be, or how the world should be, we’re in a situation of a strange kind of embrace with the other.”Distrusting the ApocalypseFigure-ground collapse in the impression of planetary hyperobjects into our immediate awarenessNeuroplasticity and neoteny – becoming childlike in order to surf accelerating changeFuture shock and getting drawn into (right-wing, fundamentalist, fear-based, racist, boundary-defending) stories as a bid for solid ground“Not knowing who we really are is part of the game. In fact, it’s one of the great opportunities of our moment.”Plasticity vs. Flexibility ~ Will or Flexibility The discipline of transforming subjectivity - religions as practical algorithms for self-transformation, not as collections of beliefsEverything you do is a self-engendering practice“I look at the 20th Century, and the most important thing that happened in the 20th Century is cybernetics – both the concept and the operationalism of creating communication feedback loops that begin to generate their own processes.”“The further I go into a cybernetic model, at least for me, it needs to be ground out in a deepening relationship with animals, with weather, with food, with plants, with plant wisdom, and definitely with those peoples – in whatever traces, in whatever mutations we can encounter them now – those groups, those societies, that had a very different relationship that’s not really mediated by the machine.”The return of the nonhuman, cultural retrieval, the archaic revival, “reanimism”Intelligence is EverywherePresent Shock & the collapse of history & Jurassic ParkThe future of time - metaperspectival timeZizek’s critique of Buddhism and how mindfulness has been coopted by neoliberal surveillance capitalism See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week’s guest is media theorist, culture critic, author, graphic novelist, documentarian, and podcaster Douglas Rushkoff! Chances are you’re a “digital native” banking on “social currency” and consuming “viral media” – which means that you are living in the world Doug prophesied for all of us back in the 1990s. I watched his debut documentary on social marketing, Merchants of Cool, in my college Introduction to Film class (which is how you know my teacher was, in fact, cool). His book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now was one of the core inspirations for this podcast and its examinations of time in the digital age remain some of my most frequently-recommended writing. More recently his book Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus launched a vital conversation about how to make sure that the “superabundance” of digital society actually MAKES IT TO THE PEOPLE. And his podcast Team Human offers new insightful conversations every week about how we can sculpt a future for the 100%-ers – a world that welcomes everybody, that lets everyone in, that finds something meaningful for all of us to do and be.Doug’s written shelves on our new media environment and how the digital surround retrieves our magical antiquity. He’s issued potent cautions to us, that we must Program Or Be Programmed. He’s spent his entire life helping us find the bottom-up to complement the top-down that we’re stuck with…to help everyone be literate enough to make it in this modern world.And in this episode, he looks back on his life’s work, and forward to the great responsibility we bear to help imagine systems, cultures, and relationships for a more humane and equitable future…Doug’s podcast:http://teamhuman.fmDoug’s website:http://www.rushkoff.com/This week we’re also joined by guest co-host Michael Phillip of Third Eye Drops, our sister podcast, which I’m on A LOT – episodes 102, 88, 58, 44 with Doug Rushkoff, 38 with Niles Heckman, 28 with Bruce Damer, 21 with Erik Davis, 9 with Shane Mauss, 4 with Erik Davis, and this special mashup episode – and who has appeared on Future Fossils to talk about Westworld in Episode 14 and the Blockchain in Episode 52.We Discuss:• the ethical necessity of finding planet-scale solutions that work for ALL of us, not just a certain economic class; • the externalized ecological costs of Bitcoin; • how sigils and other ancient magical practices have been modernized for info warfare in the modern age; • how the culture of our global information economy retrieves the gods of antiquity; • the conflict of interests between our present and future selves; • the problem with futurists as propagandists and how we use “the future” as a way to manipulate people;• and more!Doug Quotes:“The aspect of the blockchain that is the most real at this point is the environmental destruction…the smartest scientists I know have given up on the environment. They’re saying, ‘Let’s just have dinner. This is it.’ If that’s the case, then it feels like every conversation about blockchain has to start and end with that. It’s like, ‘Okay, while we’re destroying the planet with technology, isn’t it an interesting model for this and that…?’”“It’s all just sigil magic on a certain level…although now you can express it through code, instead of just alchemy.”“As far as the virtual is actual, the virtual is tied to our actual well-being. So thanks to cyberspace, we have a place where all of that symbolic activity becomes real – or at least as real as we’re willing to make this stuff. Your FICO score is on there. This is the landscape that’s defining our reality. So it turns programmers into potential magicians of unprecedented power.”“The gods that we are looking at today a re subsets of capitalism. They are really more unintended consequences of people looking to game the system, than they are the natural flowering of some higher power, higher agenda. So we’re in a similar relationship to those things, but we don’t want to be re-enacting those things. We want to be, if anything, recognizing them and creating alternatives.”“Psychologically, they found that people relate to their own future selves the same way they relate to a stranger. So the person you’re saving retirement money for is just some old guy. So on some level, I don’t really care so much if that person is suffering in the cold, because I want an iPhone X. So screw him.” “Especially in the heady days of early WIRED Magazine, where they’re saying, ‘Look! Everything’s changing! The tsunami’s coming! You better hire some futurists to tell you where it’s going or you’re all going to die’…I was arguing that it’s fine, that all futurists are propagandists of a certain sort. So if I’m going to be a futurist, I’m going to propagandize a world of peace and love and the egalitarian sensibility that we’re all moving into, NOT a long stock market boom of infinite wealth for venture capitalists.” See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

A special Boom Festival "Future Fossils on The Road" episode featuring some awesome people Michael met while playing and speaking at the amazing biennial psytrance festival in Portugal.Shaft Uddin is a Tantric Unicorn and Sacred Sexual Awakener (with noisy arm bangles): http://sacredsexualawakening.com* Support Future Fossils Podcast on Patreon: patreon.com/michaelgarfield *We discuss:Shadow work, “turning into the swerve,” and going into darkness to claim the light. Realizing that the monster in your dream is you. Dealing with people’s projections and how to make peace with the people who embody your opposite or rejected self – in other words, how to be a “polyamorous sex cult leader” with grace and dignity and humility.“There’s nothing wrong with desire. There’s nothing wrong with harnessing your sexual energy for greater abundance and manifestation.”The dam is to the river system as the taboo is to the body. How do our needs to control nature manifest in ways that obstruct or interfere with our well-being?The horrible true history of the corset – designed to keep women from speaking up for themselves.“The more I study the vagina, the yoni, the sacred space, the more I understand myself. Because I understand where I came from.”The historical tendencies of masculine magic being about projecting the will and controlling nature, and feminine magic being about aligning will with the power of natural cycles.The power of the vulnerability of group intimacy and Michael’s experience with The Body Electric School at Burning Man 2008.Shaft’s ambidextrous “twin goddess awakening” practice and the creation of circuits of loving energy and other “woo woo stuff” that cured his loneliness, depression, and substance abuse.The difference between “polyamory” as loving multiple people and recognizing the original unity and non-separation of all of us and loving universally (see also Alice Frank’s “uniamory”).Polyamory vs. Transparent Love (and other Principles of Unicornia)“Don’t leave me!”(and then immediately)”It’s okay, I’m fulfilled in myself, it’s fine.”— TIME TRAVEL (not externally, but internally) and FATE —Following the histories of the atoms that compose us into the stars and nebulae from which our parts originated = internal time travel!The myth of Atlantis as an example of “misplaced concreteness” of the racial memory of an ancient extinction our cells still remember, not necessarily the story that we tell ourselves about an ancient city.Graham Hancock’s argument that a 13,000 year old comet impact ended the Pleistocene and the possibility that epigenetic molecules have coded this event in our cell nuclei – as well as other even more ancient extinction events such as The Great Oxygenation Event (in which the evolution of photosynthesis nearly destroyed all life).People are building bunkers preparing for a catastrophe that happened two billion years ago!Recycling everything.Faith in humanity and a belief in the Star Trek vision.“I believe that we will start flourishing.”Christopher Ryan vs Stephen Pinker and clashing narratives about the progress of our species and whether or not we really are more peaceful than we were as foragers.“I get my knowledge off of YouTube and Facebook.”— WOO ALERT ––We might as well go there: crystals. Meditating on them. Going back to Lemuria through crystal meditation time travel. “OR are we projecting onto it?”Exalting the natural world by our awareness and appreciation of it. Ensouling technologies by naming them. To observe something turns it from a possibility into an actuality. So with New Age weirdness, how many hallucinations does it take to qualify as reality?Iboga teaches Shaft to “Ask a tree.”Michael: “If my cohost were here to reign me in, we might not even be having this conversation.”Biogeomagnetism and Michael’s 2008 vision-hypothesis that solar maxima and mimina might correlate to changes in the expression of different hormonal balances and behavioral patterns, possibly entirely different genetic expression patterns and states of consciousness.S: “Do you believe in past life regression? I just paid $400 for my one.”M: “Why’d you do that when you can talk to a tree for free?”Camillo introduces himself. Our first third-party guest! He weighs in on the possibility of the cycle of learning that a soul goes through…Is “how literally true it is” the right question? Or do we just have a modern human obsession with FACTS?M: “We don’t realize we’re in this Russian doll of nested dreams. And so we regard LOCAL reality as REALITY. And then you get out of that atmosphere and it gets more and more diffuse.”Writing Field Guides to the Denizens of DMT Space:- the very circus vibe- “like with ayahuasca, there’s always a snake”…and on to Jeremy Narby’s revelations in his book, The Cosmic Serpent, about how plants communicate to animals about their phytochemical properties through gross anatomy.Camillo talks about synesthetic communication with the body, mapping brain regions to reinterpret signals from the body from feeling to visual cortex processing, etc. How archetypes might be the firmware-esque stable mappings of visual and emotional content onto personified entities. (Why would something like that evolve?) Filtered through the specificities of culture, universal human archetypes become specific deities and spirits.S: “THIS is why I want to have a church.”M: “This is why my dad doesn’t want me starting a church.”The Ten Principles of UnicornUnicorn Power BalladsBiophotonics and the DNA Light InternetM: “Maybe the medieval view of things as endlessly regressing celestial spheres is closer to the truth.”Mapping possibility as multiverses on a spherical coordinate plane, and the impossible as antipodal to you, and what’s just unlikely as on the horizon, and what is as where you’re standing. And it all moves when you move.“I basically suppressed my superpowers. I chose to live a lower form of existence…because what really made me happy was ‘Getting paid and getting laid.’ And it made me super happy until two years ago, when I had my awakening.”Michael Crichton’s experience, as reported in his autobiography Travels, of learning to see auras. How Shaft and his former lover learned to see auras. Shaft and Camillo share some exercises and anecdotes about how to move energy.Burning Man as a physicalized internet and the advent of “noetic polities” in which people affiliate and orchestrate according to interests and values, not blood relations or geographic proximity. Will this “unscheduled fluid simultaneity” of liminal zones like festivals be the norm in a few decades, as we get more and more invested in the internet? Nod to Doug Rushkoff’s book Present Shock and his term “narrative collapse.” “Let’s see if it’s in flow! Kind of a spiritual bypass; no agreements.”Scheduling as a byproduct of modern city time; flow as a byproduct as tribal nonlinear time.C: “You’re not the mountain from which the river flows. You’re something in the river that’s going with it, and you’d better just swim with it.”M: “But maybe if you had the mass of a mountain in people that were all trying to get the river to flow upstream, you could do it.”M: “Do you know [of] Peter Diamandis?”S: “Like a true shaman, I don’t read. I learn through experience. Tell me.”M: “Okay, well, through my experience of reading people…”S: [Devious Cackle]Taking an active stance toward the future. Seeing yourself as an active contributor to the future (rather than feeling disempowered by someone else’s vision of the future).Abundance vs. Scarcity in history and economics and how the kind of abundance Diamandis predicts for the next century will radically change our sense of value/priority and allow us to be more deeply generous with one another.C: “A lot of us live in a state of mental scarcity when we’re actually some of the richest people in the world.”Michael’s perspective on Lisbon and the awesomeness of Europe vs. the ridiculous waste and price of the USA.Shaft and Kamillo on the difference in agricultural and food standards in the USA vs. Europe.Parag Khanna and his book Connectography, which argues that our connective infrastructure and economic relationships define boundaries more than actual national borders.The Trans-Pacific Partnership and the light and dark sides of globalism vs. planetary culture. NOT THE SAME.Shaft’s three step plan for extricating yourself from the system.(Camillo is doing the exact same thing.)C: “I think the universe is going to show you more love if you show more love to it.”Reliance on the system we are trying to escape.M: “What does capitalism actually produce? It seems like people who are trying to escape capitalism is the main product.” Alex joins the conversation and drops a knowledge ball on us about permaculture. Shaft brings up Tamera, a sustainable free love community in Portugal – and his mission to travel the world’s intentional communities and model his own on their best features.M: “Every generation’s trash becomes something valuable to the next generation.”Was the Baby Boomer acquisition/trash-creation phase the caterpillar phase of humanity, gathering and consolidating for an evolutionary transformation?Art made out of trash! Building bricks!Steve brings up the possibility of Universal Basic Income. Camillo mentions that Finland will actually be implementing UBI next year!Lynn Rothschild’s recent speech arguing for Universal Basic Income because capitalism needs consumers and a middle class to keep things in circulation.Capitalism is based on extraction - nod to Episode 9 with author Ashley Dawson on his book, Extinction: A Radical Critique.The origins of the word wealth.Everyone’s perspectives on the future:- Steve wants to get involved rather than just complaining.- Camillo wants people to learn about finding how to make their passions their jobs and creating abundance for everyone before we destroy ourselves.- Shaft believes in Star Trek, that we’ll live in a beautiful future that’s like Sweden, only everywhere.- Alex hopes that our good choices reach a critical mass that changes everything in the direction of sustainability.- Michael asks, “What is the change that each of us must go through in order to make the world we want to live in BELIEVABLE?”The only way to move forward into this world is as complete people. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Named one of ten most influential thinkers in the world by MIT, Doug Rushkoff asks some seriously big questions on this episode of Curious Minds. The biggest one is: what if an economy predicated on growth is unsustainable? Growth at companies like General Electric (GE) used to mean jobs for hundreds of thousands of people. That same growth, at companies like Facebook and Google, yields, at most, tens of thousands of jobs. As growth-oriented tech companies absorb more jobs through smarter tech and automation, is this an opportunity to rethink the nature of work, jobs, and the overall economy? Doug Rushkoff asks us to consider that topic in his latest bestselling book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity. Rushkoff is a professor of media theory and digital economics at Queens College, CUNY. He is the bestselling author of a dozen other books, including Present Shock, Program or Be Programmed, and Life Inc. In this episode, we talk about: Why Doug sees growth as the culprit in our current economy The unmet promise of technology and the long tail for artists and creatives How big data analytics reduces unpredictability and, thereby, innovation Ways more of us can take ownership of the platforms putting us out of work How it is not the job we want but the meaning, purpose, and material benefits work gives Money as a verb How currency tools like blockchain can help us rethink power and authority Twitter as a textbook case of tech success but growth company failure How digital distributism can trump digital industrialism The shift from tech as energizing to energy sucking Ruskhoff also talks about how he thinks about technology use in his own life, including which tools he chooses to use and why. Selected Links to Topics Mentioned @rushkoff www.rushkoff.com Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus by Doug Rushkoff eBay Etsy Operating system Bazaar Crusades Burning Man Acquisition IPO Wired Chris Anderson Long Tail The Long Tail by Chris Anderson Free by Chris Anderson Mondo 2000 Boing Boing Ponzi scheme Alan Greenspan Taylor Swift Power law dynamics Distributism Venture capital Capital gains tax Blockchain Bitcoin PGP - pretty good privacy Distributism Marxism Capitalism Marshall McLuhan Peer-to-peer economy Lendingtree Fintech Faustian bargain Private equity Flip this house Michael Dell The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening! Thank you to Emmy-award-winning Creative Director Vanida Vae for designing the Curious Minds logo! www.gayleallen.net LinkedIn @GAllenTC

Doug Rushkoff is one of our favorite media/tech thinkers. His new book is about how our economy is wired for growth that stifles innovation.

Tom Barbalet talks to Doug Rushkoff's class at NYU in 2000

Tom Barbalet talks to Doug Rushkoff's class at NYU in 2000